Living La Vida Loca
by The Cat's Whiskers
Summary: A hero is someone who commits an act of bravery. What price is paid by those who are heroes every day...?
1. Chapter 1

_**Disclaimer:** _The TV show _Supernatural_ and all characters therein are owned by assorted Americans, not me. This fiction is purely for the enjoyment of readers; no money is being made. All Original Characters remain the property of Catherine D. Stewart and may not be used without the express permission of the authoress.

**_Summary: _**A hero is someone who commits an act of great bravery. But what price is paid by those who are heroes day in and day out…?

_**Rating:** _'T'/15 because the story deals in part with sensitive subject matter, but there is no gore, graphic or gratuitous infliction of suffering and few bad words. Feedback as always is requested. (Please see Author's Note after Epilogue).

_**Dedication:** _For Rona, my BETA and fellow appreciator of cute guys, even if they are young enough to be our baby brothers…damn.

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 1**

It was a dark and stormy night…

…which was perfectly usual, and therefore unremarkable. Despite the pitch-black maelstrom and the torrential rain that ricocheted back from every impact like liquid bullets - and .44 Magnum ones at that – Sam's slightly reclined posture in the passenger seat was relaxed, because his brother was behind the wheel. Of course shit could happen, but if it ever did, you could take to the bank the certainty that it would not be the result of driver error on the part of Dean Thomas Winchester.

Sam had long been too wise to directly scrutinise his brother, and so apparently simply stared out into the night wool-gathering, studying Dean's face via the other's reflection in the windshield. Sam was only too aware he himself had issues with their father – enough to wallpaper a cathedral – but had never really thought that Dean might, recalling now his taunting of Dean during their not-fun impromptu tour of Dr Ellicott's Roosevelt Mental Asylum (pity nobody had realised that a lunatic _was_ in charge of the asylum)…daddy's good little soldier, he'd accused then.

Now observing Dean's clenched jaw and the obvious grinding of molars, Sam had to reappraise his opinion. Though of course it might be just _this_ yank of the filial chain that had got Dean so pissed off, as Sam knew _he_ was at the peremptory paternal diktat. No please, no thank-you, no would-you-mind, just an urgent summons to get to Nowheresville, New England stat…and of course they had, which was why they were driving Dean's old Impala in the middle of what had to be the worst summer storm in recorded history at three-thirty in the morning. Talk about your Pavlovian responses.

In view of this new food for thought, Sam wondered if he should use this rendezvous with John Winchester to try and force some of their issues into the open for once? After all, outdoing Vulcans in the repression department was a significant battle tactic for the Winchester men. It had taken him a month of deep breathing exercises and private panic attacks before walking in the door one night at seventeen and stating that he was going to college that Fall like any normal eighteen year old American. His estrangement from his father had not been a battle of sound and fury but one of attrition - freezing silences and hissed, cutting words until John had made his tactical error.

_If you go, stay gone._ It had been the get-out clause Sam had been hoping for and he had seen that epiphany clearly in his father and brother's eyes as John's harsh words had hung almost visibly in the air over the dinner table, but by the following morning he and his already packed holdall were on a bus to his pre-arranged campus dormitory. The only emotion he'd felt as the dilapidated house they'd been renting for those few months shrank in the bus's side mirror was one of profound relief and a peculiar floating feeling as if he'd spent years walking around holding an anvil in his arms that he'd finally been able to put down.

Sam allowed himself to be slightly mesmerised by the driving rain. He'd been frantic to fit in during his Freshman year. He'd got a job to support himself and met Jessica and joined the debating society and the football team and devoted himself to being the most ordinary student possible. Most importantly, it had worked. He risked a quick sidelong glance directly at his brother's profile from under his lashes. In his Sophomore year, he'd taken some Psychology classes to earn ever-useful extra credits (idly he wondered if Dr James Ellicott had had any inkling dear old dad was more psychotic than half his patients). Sam had actually learned some things as he'd sifted the psychobabble; enough to know that a photograph of the Winchester men should accompany any dictionary entry for 'dysfunctional'.

It was a pity in some ways that he'd had to jack the classes but it had become too risky. His class professor had become too interested in Sam's psyche and too pressing about more precise details of his past. A burgeoning problem that wasn't helped the day Professor Heald happened to be in the locker room when Sam and the team were showering and changing after a game, causing the man to draw some understandable if entirely erroneous conclusions about the faded scars on Sam's back. Fortunately Heald had set Coach Green up to do the probing and Green had been as transparent as glass in his fishing. Green had swallowed whole the same fiction that Sam had told Jessica about a multi-car Interstate pile-up that left several people including his mother dead.

The ploy had worked because Green believed it, and his belief had been enough to sell it to Heald. But Sam had gradually petered off the courses citing lack of time. At the time, it had suddenly dawned on Sam the impossibility of Dean being able to do the college thing, even if he had wanted to do so…or more pertinently perhaps no matter _how much_ he might secretly have wanted to. Sam's battle scars were few and relatively minor, but one glance at Dean coming out of the locker room showers in his birthday suit would have resulted in Child Protection Services descending _en masse_, because no way would anybody buy 'car crash' for those.

It wasn't surprising though; Sam had been six and Dean eleven when Dean began to accompany his father fully on John's hunts. Dean used to put Sam to bed with stern injunctions that he was to let nothing and no-one into their hotel room or rented apartment/house regardless of who or what or why. The instant the door closed Sam had scurried from his bed and peeked through the nearest window, watching the two figures disappear into the night with his heart hammering in his chest. Then he would climb back into bed and curl up in a scrunched, shivering ball; he'd been full of fear that neither would return…but it was _Dean_ he cried silent tears for, _Dean_ he would scramble up and hug tightly no matter how late they came back.

Dean would always hustle him back to bed and tuck him in with a wry quip and smug wink, brushing aside his own often vivid collection of scrapes and bruises. But by the time he was seven Sam had learned that if he pretended to be asleep when they returned then Dean would be much less cautious about how he moved about in the darkness and the sounds he made that indicated his true state of pain. By the time he was eight he could tell from the way Dean breathed whether he'd suffered a hit to his ribs and by the age of nine he could recognise the smell of Dean's blood under his clothing when his brother slipped wearily into the room and gingerly set about catching a little shut-eye in the fond belief his baby brother had been fast asleep for hours.

_Couldn't you have at least waited until he'd dealt with puberty before you turned him into your clone?_ Sam mentally demanded of his father; _he was eleven years old for god's sake. He should have been playing junior league and worrying about nothing more than the junior prom, not going up against wendigous and poltergeists – and being more of a dad to me than you were._ Maybe it was time for that to be said; did John Winchester not realise the damage he'd done, or did he simply not care in his perennial obsession?

Sam again considered Dean's reflection in the windshield and prudently decided not to broach the subject of their father and his varied failings right now. Being in the middle of nowhere in appalling weather conditions was not the time or place to provoke Dean into contemplating fratricide. And since there was no way Dean would let him take a shift at the wheel in these conditions…he closed his eyes and let the howl of the gale and the sound of the lashing rain become almost like a lullaby.

Beside him, Dean shifted slightly in his seat as Sam's breathing evened out, even though he never so much as glanced at his brother. He didn't need to; he'd always had an inner 'Sam' sense. He continued to drive expertly, completely poised and ready despite the conditions to take any and all measures to protect his brother. It was a reaction beyond automatic reflex or even instinct, a response so deeply ingrained in his mind as to be primordial; the most precious thing in his world was currently drooling slightly in the passenger seat, and would be safeguarded at the willing sacrifice of self.

Dean had been concerned Sammy would never go to sleep, and at least one of them should be alert enough to string together a coherent sentence when they met up with dad. He wasn't worried – Dean Winchester didn't do panic, people – but he was familiar enough with his father's attitude when hunting to know that John Winchester's curt and urgent command was a thin veneer disguising anxiety.

His mouth compressed as he mused on what could be so immediately urgent. It wasn't necessarily an out-and-out monster scenario like a wendigou; as long as you knew the protective Indian symbols and had a handy instant inferno weapon available, the wendigou wasn't that hard to kill – all you had to do was get a single lit match onto a wendigou and it was done for.

Harsh experience had taught Dean that sometimes the nastiest situations were those that messed with your mind rather than battered your body. Having your own baby brother try and shoot your ass in a psycho hospital had hurt a lot worse than when sadistic Bender Senior jabbed a white-hot poker into his shoulder. He had a bad feeling about this one, and his body was already aching in anticipation of him ending up with yet another cracked bone or unpleasantness that resulted in a minimum forty-two stitches.

_Continued in Chapter 2…_

© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart


	2. Chapter 2

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 2**

Sam woke up and stretched just when Dean drove past the sign announcing they were within the town limits of Wakefield, Massachusetts (population 1,318), as if he had some internal alarm clock. Both brothers scoped out the area as Dean drove well within the speed limit into town in deference to the danger of over-zealous small town sheriffs. It was one of the downsides of the modern age _and _post-9/11 America – that speedy technology which meant being pulled over and having a make run on them only took five minutes instead of an hour and often led to all sorts of complications and stress-headaches. Twice already since that whole shape-shifter deal they'd had to make out that 'dead _murder suspect_' Dean had been a namesake, lookalike, black-sheep-of-the-family cousin.

Wakefield was a little agricultural dimple in rural Massachusetts. It had surrounding orchards and fields and meadows and prettily painted wooden houses and even a nice little lake off the _River_ _Connecticut_. The sheriff's office was small and the white clapboard church large. It was Anywhere, America.

Other than agriculture, the town's income came from the main highway through it, and the truckers who stopped off at the picturesque rest stop. Without hesitation, Dean pulling into the lot and parked discreetly so it wasn't obvious to anyone looking out from inside that they hadn't arrived in a rig.

They walked up the steps side by side and stepped in to find it typically utilitarian but bright and clean. In a window booth sat a familiar figure with a round face, heavy whiskers and greying dark hair; as if metal to a magnet Dean immediately walked towards their father.

_I drove all night, just get to you…_ the song lyrics echoed in his mind, though Sam Winchester did _not_ admit to knowing the words of rock-chick songs even to himself – not with a brother who thought Metallica and music were synonyms.

_He drove all night, just to get to you_. _Do you even notice that he hasn't slept in like, fifteen hours? Do you care?_ Sam had long since made keeping his face blank of his true thoughts an art form and now his face was bland as he slid into the corner of the seat opposite John Winchester. Dean waited until he was in and then slid in next to him. Dean would never take the corner – the corner boxed you in and this way he was between bad and his brother – he was _always_ between bad and his brother.

John had only had coffee in front of him but now the waitress came and took their order. Apart from a developing five o'clock shadow Dean showed no signs that he'd been awake for over sixteen straight hours as he flirted with the waitress and ordered coffee and the breakfast special.

Sam made it unanimous for the three of them and settled back expectantly for their father's explanation, knowing that while their arrival in the small town would have been 'noted' there was little probability of trouble in the diner. Despite it being just past 6:00am there a couple of early bird rig drivers and their mates already eating. The diner staff (and passing deputies) would assume they were a trio of truckers who knew each other and think no more of it – it was one of the advantages of the fact that the three only superficially resembled each other; law enforcement types wanting to take a personal interest in the lives of 'John Winchester and two sons' tended to be looking for men with a much stronger mutual likeness.

Sam dropped his eyes momentarily as he sugared his coffee-with-cream, though Dean stuck to the macho credo of unadulterated black – or more likely he needed the undiluted caffeine hit to keep him awake. Sometimes when Sam was young and he'd had a fight with Dean or his dad about their lifestyle, he used to fantasise that he was adopted and that his real parents were Merle and Betty, accountants from New Jersey who would come one day to take him home to suburbia and actually be pleased that he had managed to achieve a _law degree _(for all the good it currently did him). Not that he _knew_ for certain – he'd taken his exam a week before Jessica…but he'd done well, he knew he had. He hadn't got the paper, might never manage to get written confirmation, but Sam _knew_ he'd passed the final exam.

But once a few years back he'd found some old family photographs, singed relics that John Winchester had taken from his home and just kept carrying around as they'd embarked on the perpetual road trip that was their life. Dean was a dead ringer for John's great-grandfather Colonel Thomas Oliver Winchester, a decorated veteran of Britain's 1899-1902 Boer War and cousin of Oliver Fisher Winchester of repeating rifle invention fame who had immigrated to America with his family in 1904. Sam in turn was the image of Mary Winchester's uncle, Corporal Samuel Daniels, a brother of her father Benjamin Daniels who'd been killed aged 19 at Omaha Beach in World War II. So that had put paid to that; one of his college classmates had later explained that in genealogical terms, it was quite common for a child to look nothing like either parent but be the very mirror of great-grandpa Joe or great-aunt Maud.

"What's the hunt?" Dean asked his dad softly – but clearly; the three of them were adept at having secret conversations in public places. Volume wasn't always necessary for distinct audibility of speech.

"Haunted house – possibly."

With a colossal effort of will, Sam swallowed a tirade and instead contented himself with pausing in the act of stirring his coffee and staring in obvious surprise at Winchester Senior. A _haunted house_? Something that Dean had been dealing with solo and in his sleep since the age of about thirteen? For this John Winchester had deprived Dean of a good night's sleep? He couldn't prevent the words slipping out, "At least tell me we're dealing with an Amityville Horror here?"

"I don't know –" John Winchester paused as the waitress came back with three large plates and a fresh pot of coffee that, by mutual silent consent, John and Sam let Dean monopolise. "That's what's got me worried."

He picked up his fork and they dove into the food, which was as good as the diner looked. Instead of the greasy cold rubber you got in a lot of places the biscuits were golden and light, the eggs hot and fresh, the ham thick and tender and the bacon crispy. Sam let Dean inhale his own breakfast and then swapped it with his own plate having left a biscuit, an egg and some ham for him.

With a grin Dean devoured it and then glugged down another cup of coffee. "Right, now I've kicked start my brain, tell us," he urged.

"The couple are Peter and Julie Hanson." John took a sip of his own coffee and leaned back against the booth seat. "They helped me out one time when I really needed it…they're good people, both of them. They have five children, starting from eleven down, but though their youngest is only just over a year old their marriage has been going down the toilet for years."

"Why?" Dean picked up a bit of bacon he'd missed from Sam's plate and looked wistfully at the denuded crockery.

John shrugged. "Nothing spectacular. They're both hard-working but career people. Over time they became just another latch-key family, a disconnected group of people who occasionally just happened to be in the same place at the same time."

"Not that latch-key," Sam pointed out, "if their youngest is only one."

"Tommy was the result of Julie recovering from stomach flu combined with spectacularly spiked punch and Peter's New Year's Eve office party – both of them admitted to me separately that neither of them had any real idea who…"

"…they were actually banging in the stationery closet when they were snockered?" Dean surmised with his usual sarcasm.

John winced but gave a confirmatory nod. "Basically, yes – the elder four are eleven, nine-year-old twins and a seven-year-old, which gives you some idea of how long their marriage has been falling apart."

"But what has a failing marriage got to do with us and what we do?" Sam asked while reasonably managing to keep the asperity out of his tone.

"Things came to a head when Emily, the seven-year-old, got a leading role in her junior school summer production of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_." John explained. "Not only did she not tell her parents, but she saved up all her allowance money and extra she earned doing odd jobs and actually managed to hire a couple of 'resting' agency model-actors to be her 'parents' on the opening night because she didn't want a mom and dad who were going to sit there and bicker through the entire play – assuming they turned up in time from work in the first place."

"Ouch." Sam muttered.

"Ingenious though," Dean praised.

John ignored their asides, "The teachers got suspicious when the 'parents' gave contradictory and vague answers and investigated because they were worried the pair were attempting to abduct the child. Once they'd got over the shock Peter and Julie realised they couldn't let things drift and so they both took a sabbatical; Peter's friend Arthur Wainwright III offered to rent them his family's home for a year and they came out here as a family to try and reconnect."

"And that's when the trouble started," Dean said knowingly.

"Yes – the usual manifestations of something seriously pissed off and possibly determined to get a body count out of it. Scratching in the walls; levitation; cold spots; telekinesis, crashing, banging, screaming, blood seeping down the walls, et cetera and so forth." John shook his head. "I've checked all the usual suspects and I've come up a complete blank. I just can't get a handle on it."

"How deep did you dig back into this Wainwright family?" Sam put aside his inherent tension with his father and applied himself to the situation – five terrified children in danger of being sliced and diced by low-flying kitchen knives and levitating TV sets that hurled themselves across the room was something he could relate to.

"All the way," John assured them, "and they're clean. In fact, they may be about the only family in America who combined wealth with _genuine_ respectability."

"Seriously?" Dean asked. "How rich are we talking?"

"The current generation is heading towards eight figures at a healthy clip," John responded dryly. "Nathaniel Wainwright I immigrated from Hampshire, England in 1687 and moved back to Connecticut after making a fortune in silver mining out West. He then made another fortune in real estate and built Wainwright House, which his descendents have lived in ever since – Arthur Wainwright III is the current patriarch and he often comes back to live here in the summers."

"And these people have no skeletons in their closet?" Sam asked sceptically. "No murder, no scandal, no family intrigue?"

"Not that I can find." John shook his head. "Nathaniel Wainwright was big on philanthropy and was determined to instil a work ethic in his children. Nathaniel Wainwright II outdid Carnegie in charitable giving. In the three centuries since Nathaniel I set up here, there have only been four illegitimate children, each of whom was acknowledged and given a hefty whack of the parental inheritance, even though two were mulattoes and one was half-Indian. Several women married into the clan with kids from a previous marriage and there again they were accepted as part of the family. The Wainwrights tended to make late marriages after all the recklessness of youth had died down and so they were a lot more sensible about it – a _lack_ of wife-beating, adultery, sexual deviancy, drunkenness and general debauchery is a recurring theme." He finished his coffee, "I double-checked, there has never been any incident of violent death at that house or on the grounds."

"You checked the ground, for anything like sacred tribal land desecration?" Dean began.

"It was No.2 on my list," John retorted wryly. "It was never used as unsanctified burial ground by a church for murderers and suicides; it was never a battlefield; no massacre of American Indians or anyone else ever took place on the spot. As for Indians, get this: the prime position for the house was about half an acre further up the hill? But when Nathaniel Wainwright I learned that position was part of a sacred Nannicato burial ground he ordered the house rebuilt from scratch at its current location and the soil damage to be repaired. The tribe made him an honorary member in thanks. In fact the Wainwright family consider that act of respect to be responsible for their good fortune ever since – the generation after Nathaniel Wainwright II made their third fortune on the railroads; they were one of the few families who didn't lose everything in the Wall Street crash of 1929 and made oodles of cash in the oil boom afterwards. Arthur III is on his way to becoming a tycoon. They're perennial supporters of Native American causes."

"And there have been absolutely no nasty, violent or unexplained deaths _ever_ since the 1700s?" Dean pressed.

"The Wainwrights overwhelmingly tended to die as nonagenarians in their beds surrounded by fat grandchildren," John affirmed. "The closest thing the house ever saw to an unpleasant demise was in 1872 –"

"Ah-ha!" Dean straightened like a cougar hound hitting a scent.

"There was no mayhem - it was a freak accident," John vetoed. "Nathaniel Wainwright III's 23-year-old daughter Charlotte was walking in the garden when her foot slipped at the top of the stone steps leading down towards the ornamental fountain. It wasn't that bad a fall but unfortunately she landed on the edge of the rockery stones and it crushed her skull. It was a tragic fluke; she was wearing silk slippers and it had rained that morning – her foot slipped. Nothing diabolical involved."

Sam looked at his father, "So if it's not the house, and it's not the Wainwrights…"

"Peter and Julie are freaking out," John admitted quietly. "When all this kicked off they made discreet enquiries and expected to find the problem in the house or the Wainwright family."

"Could it be the kids?" Dean asked suddenly. "The telekinesis and stuff – physical manifestation of stress over mom and dad's marital meltdown?"

John sighed. "It's faintly possible, but highly unlikely. Peter and Julie's marriage wasn't imploding, just slowly crumbling – all very civilised and detached. Nothing like this has happened anywhere else they have ever lived or on any previous occasion, so why now? Besides, the sabbatical let's-take-stock-idea was _working_. By the time they'd been here a month Peter and Julie were a 100 more optimistic that they could work things out and come back together again."

"And that would send the kids' stress levels into freefall, not ratchet up the adrenaline." Sam acknowledged.

"That's why I want you both to do your own investigation," John Winchester said quietly. "I need a fresh pair of eyes. I've been doing this so long that maybe familiarity is breeding complacency and things are getting dangerous. Last night Julie Hanson nearly had her skull crushed in the kitchen by a flying fruit bowl and the stress is doing nothing for their attempts to save their marriage."

"Sure," Dean acceded reaching for the coffee pot.

"And what else?" Sam challenged.

John looked startled but he couldn't meet Sam's unwavering gaze. Sam wasn't overawed by his father now, and hadn't been for some time. Few things intimidated him now – he had faced his ultimate nightmare, the one horror amongst all the monsters he'd faced that still and always would torment his dreams…_Dean is going to die, and you can't stop it_.

Except he had…of course, he hadn't known that the faith healer's wife was in league with a Reaper, but if he was honest with himself, if he had known, he couldn't say he still wouldn't have done what he had. Dean didn't know about his little detour later, when they stopped in a tiny Midwest town for gas and groceries. For just five minutes Sam had slipped away into a small chapel, anonymous and deserted and yet in some way almost alive, where he'd offered a prayer of regret to the man dead in Dean's place…_I'm so sorry, I truly didn't know. But I need him, you see; for me he's oxygen in another form. I hope you can understand, and forgive. If it's any help, I'll never forgive myself…_and he never would, but by the same token Sam knew that he would do whatever it took to keep Dean alive again if he had to.

"I think I'm being followed," John Winchester admitted, "maybe even stalked."

"By what?" Sam asked, not entirely buying it.

"God knows." John blew out a breath of frustration, "Though I'm leaning towards _who _rather than a _what. _I've doubled back and set traps and tried to draw it out. I can't pick up any obvious paranormal residue and it's smarter than your average bogeyman."

"Feds?" suggested Dean with concern. "IRS? Paranormal groupie who believes all that website crap?"

John shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed, and Sam could finally if faintly empathise. As with all things, there were always people who were aware of what was out there, knowledgeable individuals who formed mini-cultures within mainstream society who knew the score and could advise, help or offer sanctuary – people such as Caleb, The German, Preacher Jim, Missouri Moseley, and so on. John Winchester and his sons were widely renowned and recognised for the work they did within that hidden community.

Unfortunately an enthusiastic debunker on the fringes who believed he knew far more than he did and thought of himself as the Howard Stern of the supernatural had run a 'demon hunters extraordinaire' exposé about the Winchesters on his website. Fortunately only the lunatic fringe read it (those whose brains weren't fried by one LSD trip too many) but it was out there in the cyber-ether, accessible to anyone who took the five seconds to Google JOHN WINCHESTER.

"I've no idea, and right now I've more important concerns." John said sternly towards Sam. "If we don't come up with a solution one of the Hanson children could be injured or killed."

_Continued in chapter 3…_

© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart


	3. Chapter 3

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 3**

Sam pushed his potato round his plate with his fork, but didn't really transfer much of it to his mouth. Not that he was alone in his lack of appetite. A general pall of gloom pervaded the elegantly appointed dining room of the ancestral Wainwright mansion, caused mainly by the Winchester males' expressions of 'we have no good news'.

Dean and Sam had run their own investigation and as they had never doubted found that their father had been thorough and comprehensive. Peter and Julie Hanson stuck to their claim that there had never been any similar occurrences previously in the family. This claim was backed up by the children, who were usually reliable as barometers of what honestly went on. All of the kids (with the exception of one-year-old Tommy whose conversation was limited to 'beb-beb') corroborated their parents' statements. Apart from the occasional typical sibling strops, eleven-year-old Sylvie, nine-year-olds Benjamin and Barnabas and of course the precocious seven-year-old Emily were a great deal more well-adjusted than Dean and Sam had ever been at that age.

Apart from the Hansons the only other people were Bernice Hoskins, the housekeeper/cook, Harry Warwick, a handyman/gardener and Clarice Wigmore Tommy's nanny/Emily's childminder. All three were agency staff hired for the summer from the city; they came daily and didn't live in and had been unknown to the Hansons previously. Likewise the Hansons hadn't brought any of their own furniture with them as the house was fully furnished; the fixtures and fittings had been in the house dating back to the time of Nathaniel Wainwright I, but above and beyond them being valuable antiques, they had never caused any trouble _vis-à-vis_ levitating etc., for the Wainwrights or anyone else.

In short, all the usual suspects had cast iron alibis.

Dinner more or less petered out and they all drifted into one of the nearby sitting rooms. It was a large room with an ornate marble fireplace, the dark wood panelling and deep, burgundy leather couches offset by graceful, large Palladin windows framed by heavy drapes and thick, bright oriental rugs. Sam sat Tommy against the corner and right arm in one of the old square-backed sofas, keeping his palm lightly atop the boy's head just in case the baby listed over. Sylvie and the twins sat as close to their parents as they could in clear determination not to miss a thing whilst Emily was more interested in the little wooden rocking horse on one shelf.

He kept a weather eye on the kids and let John and Dean take over the doomsayer deal. Dean was always complaining that he was so wrapped up in trying to 'soften' the blow that he spent an hour talking around it, which was rich – being critiqued on his people skills by the Sultan of Sarcasm! The room was dominated by a massive four-by-two oil painting of Nathaniel Wainwright I on the wall above this couch, but it wasn't as ostentatious as some he'd seen. That guy down in Maine had a virtual floor-ceiling oil painting of his florid and flabby great-whoever in the entrance hall scowling down at all comers. The guy had been prepared to pay them any price to get rid of his poltergeist problem but had then insisted they use the tradesman's entrance to his mansion at all times. It had taken fifteen minutes of solid non-stop talking to persuade an apoplectic Dean not to invite more poltergeists _in_ rather than exorcise _out_ the one already there.

Most of the other paintings were much more modest in scope, interspersed with those gilt-framed antique portrait type photographs of various Wainwright progeny from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. None of the men and women in the faded sepia portraits were grinning, but most had a definite upturn of the lips detectable, indicating a general contentment of spirit since back when photography was first invented in the 1850s, _smiling_ at the camera was the ultimate _faux pas_.

"…and that's it," He tuned in to hear John Winchester wind down. "I'm just so sorry we couldn't be of any more help. This one has got me stumped."

Peter and Julie nodded with almost a commiserating attitude, and Sam noted that even as they looked glum, Peter squeezed his wife's hand. Maybe the whole deal wasn't a total washout after all then? Adversity would always either bring a family together or tear it apart, and it looked like the Hansons might still be leaning towards the former –

Sam blinked as the large gilt-framed photograph on the wall directly opposite him trembled and twitched as everything else remained static.

Once again he saw it spasm; reacting instantly Sam yelled, "_Get down!_" even as he snatched Tommy from the couch and jumped to one side.

Everyone scrambled down, Dean grabbing Emily, John, Sylvie and their parents hauling a twin each off the couch to the rug as the whole room vibrated violently like a train thundering past a rickety slum tenement. There was a loud _crash_ and the disturbance instantly stopped.

Sam got to his feet with Tommy wailing in his arms, and sucked in his breath – the photograph had flown across the room and hit the couch in the exact spot where Tommy had been, with such force that one corner of the ornate gilded frame was embedded in the back of the couch like an axe buried in a tree-trunk. The glass front of the photograph had broken into pieces from the impact and lay in shards on the seat.

Another second and…his eyes met Dean's across the room and his older brother nodded his approbation.

Crying herself, Julie Hanson plucked Tommy from his arms and began to cuddle the sobbing baby as everyone slowly tried to recover their equilibrium. Emily was doing a limpet thing in her dad's arms; Ben and Barney clung to each other while a white-faced Sylvie hovered over them like mama bear.

"Enough!" Peter made a sharp slicing gesture with his free hand as his other held Emily tightly. "This is it. First thing tomorrow morning, we pack up and go back home. This has gone quite far enough. John –"

"We'll stay the night and help you pack in the morning," John said calmly. "It's the least we can do."

"And I suggest we double up on the sleeping arrangements just in case this thing figures out its patsies are going to scarper." Dean put in. "If Peter and Julie have Sylvie, Emily and Tommy, dad can sleep on the floor of the twin's room, me and Sam will take the next bedroom."

Everyone concurred and Sam shot Dean a grateful look, ignoring the way Dean smirked and winked, the older man as always deflecting and downplaying emotion. The nightmares that had been triggered by Jessica's murder were still present and correct, and more and more of them were segueing into often gruesomely Technicolor visions of peril. Mere nightmares or prescient visions, each occurrence possessed common denominators that included Sam thrashing, yelling and suffering severe headaches, with the doubling-over in pain and sweating like a pig as he swore through agony-clenched teeth as a garnish. A restful bedmate, roommate or just 'guy to try and get a good night's sleep around', he was not.

Despite the relatively early night, they all started to turn in. With that amazing ability to organise 72 things simultaneously inherent in the being known as _mother_, Julie got the kids to ferret out backpacks and holdalls and start packing what they could. Apart from the larger baby equipment (Arthur Wainwright III being a fifty-year-old bachelor) they'd not had to bring any 'big items' with them. What they couldn't fit in their SUV tomorrow they could always arrange to have forwarded on to them.

Showers were taken, hair was washed and teeth were cleaned - in the twins' case by sending them back to the bathroom after their mother's inspection revealed that no fluoride had come near them that day. Dean, the rat, had nullified the incipient temper tantrum duet by revealing that it had been hell to make Sam clean _his_ teeth because he was scared of dropping the electric toothbrush into the sink and being electrocuted.

"That's silly!" declared Ben – or Barney – scornfully.

"Yeah, so I switched to an ordinary hand toothbrush," Dean regaled them, unaware of the telling slip of 'I' rather than 'dad', "but then I made the mistake of pretending the bristles were _real _hedgehog spines, and he wouldn't clean his teeth then so the hedgehogs wouldn't have their spines clipped off."

"That's even more silly!" declared Barney – or Ben – with greater scorn.

"Oh yeah, and what about the night you just squeezed the tube without looking and it wasn't toothpaste, it was –" Sam got no further as Dean firmly placed his hand over his mouth while Julie chided the twins to bed.

Finally Sam allowed the day's stress to seep from his joints as he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Nobody was going to tolerate full darkness; the hallway outside had the wall-lamps on and every room featured a nightlight. Julie and Peter's bed in the Master suite was easily large enough to accommodate the parents, the baby and their two daughters. The bedroom just down the hall from that was the twin's room and was one of the two that had twin beds. Instead of the floor, Julie had had the boys share one bed and John Winchester took the other, while Sam and Dean were across the hall in the other twin-bedded room as all the other bedrooms contained a single king-size bed. Nathaniel Wainwright I had had seven children, Nathaniel Wainwright II nine, and each bedroom was large, spacious and as comfortably appointed as the Wainwright finances allowed for – which was a lot of comfort.

Dean fidgeted in the other bed, "I haven't been in bed this early since I was in footie pyjamas," he complained, then smirked, "or else was doing something _other_ than sleep!"

"Well I don't feeling like trying to watch the game or making small talk with the Hansons, do you?" Sam said.

"Nah…"

"Dean, aside from this…when we were investigating, did you get any sense of…"

"Dad's stalker dude?"

"Yeah."

"Yep. Nothing I could put my finger on but sometimes I got a definite sensation I was being watched by something that didn't like us much. Unfortunately that gives us a list of possible suspects you could wrap twice around the world."

"You."

"What?"

"You said didn't like us much; maybe it was just you."

"Thanks a lot."

"Somebody has to keep a leash on your ego."

"Go to sleep, Sammy."

"Night-night, Dean."

"Shut up…"

Sam closed his eyes and waited; just as he felt himself drift off he heard the soft, "…night Sam," and smiled.

_Continued in chapter 4…_

© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart


	4. Chapter 4

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 4**

_Flying through the air with the greatest of ease…I am the king of the circus trapeze!_

Sam blinked blearily and shoved his head further into the pillow as the clock's LED read 3:47am. One of the disadvantages of an early night was obviously waking up chipper and chirpy an hour before dawn – with nonsensical rhymes permanently looping through your brain.

He yawned, trying to clear his head of the fanciful dream this time, a nice change from the searing revelations of mayhem and feeling as if someone had buried an axe in his head. Thinking of which, it had been lucky with that photograph hurling across the room…hurling…across…across…

Sam's drooping eyelids snapped back up. Wait a minute…

He sat up and shoved back the covers; they had just disrobed to their shorts and he began to pull his pants and shirt back on.

Dean instantly came awake and frowned, sitting up and glancing around alertly in warrior mode. "What's going on?"

"Get up and get dressed."

Dean cast one dyspeptic eye at the clock but complied, pulling on his jeans and his shirt as Sam sat back down on the bed to put on his socks and shoes. "What have you figured out?"

"I'm not sure," Sam admitted, "but I think we've been missing a big chunk of this puzzle. I'll get the others."

Dean pulled on his socks and shoes while Sam went and chivvied everyone. In about fifteen minutes a coterie of sleepy, grumpy people were assembled in the hallway with the exception of Tommy who slept in Peter's arms, his head on his father's shoulder.

"Sam, what's going on?" John asked, squinting slightly.

"I want to check something, come on." Sam led the way downstairs to the drawing room and asked Peter to sit with Tommy on the gashed couch where Tommy had been until Sam saved him from the photograph. "Everyone look around the room, and tell me what's wrong with this _picture."_

It was Julie, surprisingly, who got it, maybe because of her maternal protective instincts. "The picture! No, that one, the Nathaniel Wainwright I painting. To hurt Tommy…"

"Exactly," Sam agreed as Peter stood up again so he could look at the oil painting on the wall behind him. "The photograph that flew across the room didn't twitch _until_ I was looking _straight at it_, and if anything had really wanted to hurt Tommy why expend all that energy throwing a heavy photograph frame across the width of a room when all it had to do was flirt this beast –" he rapped the canvas with his knuckles, "- forward all of six inches."

Sylvie scowled and intelligently asked, "Who was the photograph of that flew at Tommy?"

The adults exchanged glances. "Bright girl," praised Dean, going to where the photograph had been laid on a side table after the glass had been cleared away by Julie. He lifted it up and peered at the neatly typed label below the image of a young man who looked to be around the mid-twenties mark. "Nathaniel Wainwright IV it says here, taken on the White House lawn in 1870."

"I don't see the relevance?" Peter asked in confusion.

"Neither do I but think about it," Sam urged, "you have suffered severe paranormal disturbances in this house for nearly a month yet _no-one _has been physically hurt. Julie said the fruit bowl began to rock violently before it flew through the air; Sylvie said the lamp began to buzz and shake before it threw itself at her. None of you have been injured in any way because this thing telegraphs its intentions, and throws like a girl."

"On behalf of my gender, hey," muttered Julie.

"You know what I mean," Sam shrugged. "Either we're dealing with the world's most _inept_ malevolent entity, or else there's something else entirely going on that we are just not understanding."

"Yeah, but what connects the dots?" Dean retorted.

"He was _her_ bruvva." Little Emily, who had gone straight back to playing with the rocking horse, suddenly spoke.

"What, honey?" Julie asked.

Emily walked over to Dean and tapped a little finger on the photograph he was holding. "He was her brother, that lady who hit her head and was dead in the morning."

There was pause as they recognised her confusion with the old doggerel rhyme about the old man snoring who hit his head and went to bed and was dead in the morning, and then John Winchester clarified, "You mean Charlotte Wainwright? The woman who fell down the steps and hit her head and was killed?"

"Yes." Emily nodded. "There's a paper on my bedroom wall with all the moms and dads and children on for the Wainwright people."

"A family tree," murmured Sam. "So, the photograph is that of Nathaniel Wainwright IV, who was the brother of Charlotte Wainwright; the only person ever to have suffered anything close to a violent death in the vicinity. Is there any other connection?"

"I've got one," Sylvie raised her hand, looking sheepish.

"What is it?" Peter asked.

"Well, I know you told us not to touch anything because the furniture is very valuable, but I really needed an extra lamp for my bedroom, so I took the one that flew through the air," Sylvie admitted. "I took it from the bedroom that used to belong to him."

"But surely that wouldn't apply to the fruit bowl," John mused, "or to that exploding vase…though that snuff box that tried to take Peter's eye out could be."

"Wait, I know something that might be of use, in the library. How about a bunch of Quarterman sketches?" Peter suggested, carefully passing the still sleeping Tommy to Julie.

"As in William Quarterman, the 19th Century watercolour artist?" Sam said as they followed Peter to the library. "His stuff is extremely rare and worth millions – come to think of it, the Wainwright family is the only group to own a significant collection of his works."

"Not surprising," Peter explained, "William Quarterman was a house servant for Nathaniel Wainwright III after the American Civil War. His mother had died when he was three in a typhoid epidemic and he'd lost his father and a brother fighting for the Confederates and his other two brothers and an uncle for the Union. He practised his technique by making incredibly accurate colour and monochrome drawings of various rooms in Wainwright House. Nathaniel Wainwright III found him at it one day and sponsored him through New York's most prestigious art college and the family bought everything he ever produced. Arthur Wainwright I bought a Quarterman watercolour from him in 1899 for $100 and Arthur III sold it to a member of the Japanese Imperial family last year for $5.3 million."

Entering the library, Peter went over to a glass cabinet and unlocked it, carefully taking out a bundle of something wrapped in oiled sealskin. Gingerly he opened the protective wrapping and eased the fragile drawings out over the table. Various rooms of the Wainwright House had been precisely drawn, down to minute details, over a time period ranging from 1865 to 1878.

"Here," John pointed at one drawing, being careful not to touch it. "Nathaniel Wainwright IV's bedroom, completed March 15th, 1871. Look, there's the lamp that Sylvie borrowed."

"And the vase that is – that was – in the downstairs sitting room when we first came," Julie pointed, "before it went off like a grenade."

"We're two for two," Dean murmured.

"Three for three." Peter had stepped away from the table and now turned back, holding a magnifying glass over the page – he indicated the mantelpiece. "Present and correct - one large silver snuff box that tried to take my eye out."

"Can't see the fruit bowl though?" Julie peered at it.

"Wait, there, you can't actually see it from the angle of the drawing, but you can see a bowl reflected in the mirror over the fireplace," Sam indicated.

"That looks like it." Julie agreed.

Carefully Peter returned the sketches to the cabinet as Julie asked, "But what does it mean?"

"Sam?" prompted Dean.

Sam thought about it. "We need to exhume the body."

"Cool!" chorused the twins.

"Whoa, we can't just start digging up Arthur's ancestor!" Peter protested.

"Yes we can." Dean contradicted. "Look, the Wainwright family plot isn't visible to any passers by and I'll lay odds that we're talking family crypt not graves under sod. I promise you, if there's no cause for concern we'll put everything back as good as new."

"But…" Peter protested.

"Trust me, nobody knows better than us the dangers of unnecessarily disturbing the dead," Dean said with understatement, "but if we don't, this thing might follow you wherever you go, so unless you want that…?"

"But what do you hope to find in Nathaniel Wainwright IV's grave?" Peter demanded unhappily.

"Nothing," Sam interjected, "it's Charlotte Wainwright we're going to exhume."

_Continued in chapter 5…_

© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart


	5. Chapter 5

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 5**

"What're you thinking, Sam?" his father asked into the dewy morning air.

By the time they'd finished, it had been almost four-thirty in the morning, but no way were they going to go grave-disturbing until full light. Now they all trooped out to the family cemetery behind the house so they could get this over and done with before Bernice Hoskins, the first of the hired help to arrive, pulled up at seven o'clock.

As Dean had claimed, the Wainwrights ran to mausoleums and marble crypts for their interment, though again a lack of the ostentatious curlicues and such that adorned many wealthy persons' places of eternal repose was pleasantly apparent. It was simply a question of walking into the crypt, prising off the lid and _voila_.

Sylvie and Emily were grossed out in an excited way, the twins were loving it and little Tommy simply leaned contentedly against his mother, watching proceedings with big baby eyes.

"Something I hope I'm wrong about," Sam answered obliquely.

John Winchester didn't press him as they went down into the vault; nobody did. Asking Peter if there were any family papers or diaries he could look at, Sam had spent the previous hour-and-a-half in the library poring over every word pertaining to Charlotte Wainwright from cradle to grave and had come out with a grim visage that precluded interrogation.

Julie and Peter sternly insisted the four children stood back whilst John and Dean, wearing improvised face-masks, prepared to crowbar the lid off Charlotte Wainwright's coffin. It was positioned directly below that of her mother Annetta Wainwright, Nathaniel III's first wife, and had clearly never been disturbed since it had been placed there.

Everyone flinched at the crack of the lid as it gave. John and Dean eased it aside carefully and everyone moved closer to see. Apart from jewellery, only the skeleton and some remnants of a silk gown remained; but the crushing damage to the left side of the skull was obvious.

Julie Hanson drew in a sharp breath. "Oh…"

In the centre of the coffin at about waist level, rested a tiny but perfectly formed skull and the curved vertebrae of a spine. Stepping forward, his lips pressed tightly together, Sam used a pair of sterilised kitchen tongs to pop a couple of the foetal vertebrae into a plastic bag. After he had done, John and Dean replaced the coffin lid and sealed it with glue, scattering dust over it to give the illusion of it being undisturbed.

"Is there any way of getting a DNA sample of Nathaniel Wainwright IV without opening his coffin?" Sam asked Peter grimly.

"Yes there is but why…" Peter's voice trailed off; he and Julie shot quick glances at the children as they figured out what he _wasn't_ saying. "Back at the house."

They left the crypt, John, Dean and Sam making sure it looked as if it had not been disturbed. Taking them back to the library, Peter opened a cabinet drawer and showed them the little glass compartments where generations of Wainwright parents had placed a curl of their child's hair. Using a pair of tweezers and another plastic bag, Sam got a couple of strands from the sample labelled as Nathaniel IV.

"Is there any way we could have a comparative DNA test done on these fast?" he asked Peter.

"Let me take them into town." Peter suggested, "I can arrange to have the results tomorrow night, no questions asked."

"Thanks." Sam nodded gratefully as Peter took the samples and left.

Fortunately the subtext had gone over the children's heads and the adults made sure that they were kept distracted and focussed on other things for the remainder of the day. For the Winchesters, it was almost like a vacation as they spent the day doing nothing more innocuous than playing softball with the kids. When night came, Sam stated that he believed there would be no disturbances, and he was right.

The following day went on as normal, and again the adults made sure that the kids had a day of very _tiring _fun and were asleep in bed when Peter Hanson opened the folder delivered that afternoon by express courier from his no-questions contact. He looked at the results and handed it to Sam, who read it with no indication of any great surprise and passed it on to Dean.

Julie's face twisted in distaste as she read what they had. The DNA test results were conclusive – 'vertebrae' was the child of 'hair strand'.

"Charlotte Wainwright and her brother had an incestuous relationship…how did you know?" Peter asked Sam.

"It wasn't a revelation; it just sort of floated around the edges of my mind." Sam shrugged as if it had been a lucky guess; after all he could hardly explain that personal experience of an unnaturally intense, co-dependent sibling bond had been the cause of his epiphany.

His and Dean's profoundly and (doubtless unhealthy) inter-dependent relationship had grown and intertwined like a hothouse vine from their childhood spent perpetually on the road with nobody but each other and John Winchester. It had occurred to him to wonder what twists that bond might potentially develop in such a case but where the two siblings in question were of different sex, and once he'd _had_ that thought the rest wasn't a quantum leap.

Sam expounded, "Nathaniel IV and Charlotte were only 16 months apart in age and their mother Annetta died in childbirth to a stillborn son in 1851, just 13 months after Charlotte was born. Nathaniel III's business commitments – and his burying himself in work to ease his grief - meant he had to spend most of his time in New York, Boston and Washington D.C., so the two children…"

"Grew up isolated and alone here in Wakefield, just the two of them rattling around this big old mansion with only each other for company, and the odd servant they passed in the halls." John Winchester surmised.

"They hit puberty, the hormones kicked in and the rest is history," Dean commented. "In a house this large as long as they were sensible nobody would have suspected a thing, especially once the servants had left for the day or were tucked up in their quarters under the eaves."

"But then Charlotte got pregnant," Julie put in, shaking her head, "I mean…how long? She was 23 when she died…how long had they been…?" she swallowed, "Please don't tell me that somewhere in this back garden there is a bunch of murdered-baby graves."

"No." Sam quickly shook his head. "A series of infanticides was what I was looking for when I was reading the diaries, to see if that could account for the disturbances."

"Murdered children are at the top of the restless dead scale," Dean explained softly, sadly, "Their innocence was pure – and their rage therefore righteous."

Sam continued on quickly at the Hansons' obvious distress. "I'd say their affair started from when they hit adolescence and, like Dean said, an acutely-intense, stiflingly close relationship and no other candidates to focus all the hormones on did the rest. But when she was ten, Charlotte fell seriously ill with Scarletina and German Measles. She could have died, and the doctors believed she was infertile."

"So they avoided the bullet for years but then…" Peter frowned, "but why has all this been happening to us? What's the point?"

Sam sighed wearily, "There'll never be any proof, but I don't believe for a second that Charlotte Wainwright had a freak accident. I believe Nathaniel IV murdered her."

"Because of the baby?" Julie surmised shrewdly.

Sam nodded, "When dad checked into the Wainwrights he turned up nothing but nice people, but even the best families have a few rotten apples. Nathaniel and Charlotte Wainwright pursued their incestuous liaison for a decade or even more without detection or difficulty, but then Charlotte, who had been told she was barren, experiences what to _her_ is a miracle – she's pregnant. She doesn't give a damn that it's her brother's child; she is finally going to be a mother."

"But Nathaniel was freaked big time?" Dean put in dryly.

"Oh yeah. If Charlotte had the kid, she'd have _him_ over a barrel forever, even assuming she kept quiet about the father's ID to everyone else," Sam said, "and if it _was_ discovered who had sired her child, his sweet lifestyle would have exploded in his face. Father or not, Nathaniel Wainwright III would have brought him to book for his crime – and his sin. On top of that, Nathaniel III had recently acquired a viable heir _other_ than Nathaniel IV – Arthur Wainwright I, his infant son by his second wife."

"So Charlotte flatly refused to abort, and Nathaniel IV was faced with losing all that lovely inheritance from daddy." Dean took up the conjecture. "So Nathaniel IV sneaks in a rock from the rockery and bashes Charlotte's head in during an opportune moment when there are no servants around, probably when she was asleep or engrossed reading a book or something. He then replaces the rock where he found it and takes her body out from the house into the garden, so it looks like she slipped and fell, helped by the incidental rain shower that morning, which made the paving stones greasy."

"How do you know he didn't lure Charlotte out into the garden and kill her there?" Julie enquired.

Dean smiled, "Silk slippers. As soon as Sam said he thought her brother murdered her I realised how unlikely it was that Charlotte would go for a walk in the garden so soon after rain in something as flimsy as silk slippers – especially since she _was_ pregnant. I don't know anything about female infertility but I can't see her doing anything that would jeopardise her baby, such as walking on wet, uneven surfaces wearing inappropriate footwear."

"And he got clean away with it," Peter snorted, "because they just buried her without an autopsy."

"There was no reason to." John Winchester pointed out. "In those days celibacy until after matrimony was assumed automatically in the case of women. Charlotte Wainwright was not courting any man as far as anyone knew, and was widely believed to be sterile. Plus there was a clearly obvious cause of death and a victim who was the only daughter of a very rich local man. The idea of an autopsy never occurred and Charlotte was simply laid to rest in the crypt with nobody any the wiser they were burying two people."

Peter scowled now, "But the foetal skeleton was fully formed, so she had to be so far along…I mean, wouldn't she have 'shown' a little?"

John Winchester shook his head. "Not necessarily, it all depends on the position of the foetus in the womb. When my wife, Mary, was expecting Dean here, she looked as if she were wearing a balloon under her dress from about three months because Mr Impatient was lying forward in her pelvis, but Sam was positioned back towards her spine, so she still had a pancake-flat stomach at six months – Mary loved being able to get into her size ten jeans and be able to tell everyone she was seven months pregnant."

"I didn't experience any morning sickness or bloating with Emily until I was nearly five months pregnant," Julie reminded her husband quickly as John Winchester's pain became an almost tangible thing in the room, "if the baby was lying back in Charlotte's womb as you say and she wasn't worshipping the porcelain every morning or suffering irrational cravings for bananas and mustard at two in the a.m., she may have been able to hide it quite easily."

"The one bright bit is that Nathaniel didn't get to enjoy much of the cash and highlife he killed her for." Sam informed them with satisfaction. "Six weeks after he murdered Charlotte, Nathaniel Wainwright IV died in a cholera outbreak in Boston aged 25 and his half-brother Arthur Wainwright I eventually got everything, lock stock and barrel as Nathaniel Wainwright III's only surviving child."

"So that's it?" Peter demanded. "_Charlotte_ wanted us to know that her brother whacked her and for this she played Pinyada with our household fixtures and fittings for two months? Why us? Why not throw things at the Wainwrights!"

There came a loud bang from a nearby room. They jumped up and hurried out into the hallway, but the continued silence from upstairs showed that fortunately the noise had not disturbed the children. They went into the room, which was just another sitting room, except that it had a large plasma-screen TV and VCR combination, which was currently on.

Moving forward, John Winchester turned off the TV/VCR and unplugged it from the wall. The screen momentarily went blank but a second later the snow came back, even though there was no power going to it. Dean and Sam exchanged knowing glances.

The TV screen flicked onto a picture, for a moment just vague shapes before coalescing into clear images. Sam's eyes widened in shocked revulsion; little Tommy was seated on top of a kitchen worktop, naked from the waist down. With one hand, Clarice Wigmore fondled his tiny genitals; she had her blouse open and was using her other hand to move Tommy's hand back and forth over her nipple. She swayed slightly, a dreamy smile on her face, until Tommy squirmed, batting at her fingers between his legs with his free hand, a miniature scowl on his face. With a hiss she pinched him and made his eyes tear up as she was jerked out of her reverie and ignored him as she angrily began to re-button her blouse, even when Tommy wriggled dangerously close to the edge of the worktop.

The screen went blank and there was a sharp click – a tape shot out of the impossibly functioning VCR and Julie Hanson caught it like she'd been a pro-ball player all her life as the machinery finally and abruptly went as dead as it should have done when John pulled the plug.

"Charlotte Wainwright's son – or daughter – was unable to speak out in his or her own behalf, and was murdered along with Charlotte; unknown, unmourned, unmissed." Sam said quietly. "Charlotte encountered another child who couldn't speak for himself and became his voice."

"You can say you accidentally left camcorder running; take that tape to the sheriff and you'll put Clarice Wigmore away for a long time. And for what it's worth…Tommy is a year old. As he grows up, he'll have no memory of this happening. You'll be haunted for ever, but Tommy will suffer no ill effects." John Winchester didn't look at Sam as he spoke quietly but with absolute certainty; it wasn't necessary – Sam had no memory of the woman whose ghost never entirely faded from standing just behind John and Dean Winchester's shoulders.

_Continued in Chapter 6…_

© 2006, CD Stewart


	6. Chapter 6

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 6**

"This is the point where we need to move on," Sam gave Peter and Julie Hanson his best smile – his No.1 _sweet baby brother _smile that he used to use (and still did) to make Dean cave to his little brother's wishes – in order alleviate any hint that the Winchesters were running out on them, "the last thing you need is our presence muddying the waters with the sheriff."

John and Dean were nodding agreement as they took the three men's gear and prepared to depart back to town in Dean's car. Just before Bernice Hoskins at arrived at seven o'clock, Julie Hanson had phoned the employment agency and cancelled Clarice Wigmore for the day using the excuse of unexpected visiting relatives. Julie and Peter would unpack their belongings once more to stay for the rest of the year, but first they were gathering the children and heading for Wakefield sheriff's office with a vengeance. It didn't take a genius IQ to realise that little Thomas Hanson was highly unlikely to be the woman's first victim. While Julie had been on the phone to the agency, John Winchester had discreetly drawn Peter out of earshot and in a quiet aside suggested that if he had the sheriff check, it would very probably be found that Ms Wigmore strongly preferred to work only with _pre-vocal _children. Coupled with the Hansons' video tape, her M.O. designed to target victims unable to speak out against her could be turned back upon her.

Sam wouldn't have liked to have been Clarice Wigmore in Julie Hanson's vicinity, but over and above complications with the local reps of the law, he certainly did not want _Dean_ to manage to get within striking distance of the evil woman. When Sam was eight he had met a man, cheerful and jolly and friendly. By that time he was so accustomed to real monsters, things with fangs and claws and insane bloodlust which viewed little boys as a tasty mid-morning snack, that he had not been able to see through the far more subtle veneer of the monster disguised as a man – he was too used to Evil _looking_ like it.

He hadn't really liked the 'touching game' his new friend had started to play and had told Dean. Sam had never before seen the look that came over his thirteen-year-old brother's face, but it frightened him. John Winchester had been gone somewhere on another hunting trip as per usual, and Dean had simply, quietly, told Sam he would take care of everything. Sam didn't see his friend again after that and a week later the man had been in the local newspaper as a missing person, something that for some reason had terrified Sam at the time though he couldn't have consciously said _why_. The incident had quickly been forgotten and most of the time Sam didn't think about it…but when Mary Worthington had been trying to kill them, Sam had had a pretty good idea why _Dean's _eyes also bled…_a secret where someone died._ It had been part of the reason why he had confessed that Mary would come after him – before Dean could. It was one thing to _know_ what your brother had done, another thing entirely to be suddenly faced with the prospect of him making it far too real by _saying_ it aloud.

Dean drove them back to town. By unspoken consent Sam drove Dean's Impala around the back of the diner to transfer things to John's car that he had parked there to hide it from the eyes and curiosity of the town's law enforcement representatives, while Dean accompanied their father to the little bed-and-breakfast motel to collect his remaining possessions and pay the bill. John had been known to skip out on motels in the small hours but not this time; he was known to be a friend of the Hansons and it would have been socially embarrassing for them – and by extension the wealthy, powerful Arthur Wainwright III – to have him split town without paying his motel bill.

Dean waited silently while John made trite small talk with the hotelier and as usual paid cash. None of the Winchesters had had a bank account or credit card in their real names for years, and especially not since that ludicrous website article on them by that Fox Mulder wannabe; such things were simply too easy to trace by interested parties such as Federal agencies and bureaucrats – and things that weren't totally or even slightly human.

Dean felt his tension rise as proceedings wound down. He could see dad gearing up to do his patented, 'Well it's been fun but I gotta…' gig from here. Sam wouldn't take it and they would fight, and Dean, as always, would the juicy bone caught in the middle of this pair of snarling dogs, the one being emotionally savaged and forced to make impossible choices. He used to wonder how mom would have handled the war until he realised that if mom were alive, there wouldn't have _been_ any war. Mary Winchester wouldn't have tolerated this crap from either husband or son; she'd have set them down hard immediately.

His cell phone vibrating in his jacket pocket made him jump slightly. Plucking it out, Dean frowned in puzzlement at the direct call symbol on the screen. All calls to his cell were voicemails forwarded from John Winchester's cell, and the only two people in the world who could or would simply call _him_ were right here.

Flicking it open he raised it to his ear, "Yeah?"

"Dean, get dad and come round to the car."

"What?"

"It's important."

The phone clicked off. Dean looked at it for a moment; Sam's tone had been sharp to the point of rudeness.

There certainly hadn't been time for Sam to get snockered on the diner's beer or high on some miraculously scored local illegal herbage, besides which, Sam would never have done either. Even when Sam was alone at college for two years, Dean had never been worried about his brother ending up on the road to committing slow suicide by Scotch or acquiring a desperate need for Columbian nose candy. The major 'in' for demonic possession and similarly related nastiness was a person not fully in control of their own mind – which was why he himself avoided travelling on airplanes unless absolutely forced and preferably sedated, because when it came to 'leaving your mind wide open to demonic squatters' idiocy, top of the Big Three was an extreme emotional state.

And the other two were being drunk or high. It was why certain meditation techniques were so dangerous, and why certain religions that did allow meditation – such as Judaism and Christianity in the Bible – explicitly forbade doing so in conjunction with the use of alcohol and/or narcotic herbs. Unless you were _very _careful you were spiritually putting up a FOR RENT sign outside your body and could find your Id being carjacked and dumped naked at the side of the road while a laughing demon roared off in your prize Mustang for a murder and mayhem road trip that _you_ would take the rap for.

"Dad, Sam wants us at the car," he smoothly stepped forward.

John shot him a look of gratitude at being rescued from the oblivious hotelier, who was reciting a tee-by-tee account of his last golfing vacation and hadn't even left the first hole yet. Hastily making their excuses, the two men went over to the diner and nonchalantly strolled around to the back.

Where Sam was standing very still with a large gun pressed hard against his temple.

Dean stopped dead, his agile mind momentarily stuttering at the sight. He could count on a couple of fingers the number of times that whatever had been trying to whack them turned out to be human and so, despite the mini-arsenal always within reach, had only a little practical experience of killing humans. The guy who currently had one arm around Sam's throat forcing his head back looked completely human…and kinda scrawny.

…and young if his adolescent acne was anything to go by.

The teenager's eyes – if he was nineteen, he was pushing it – almost glowed back with the intensity of his rage. Sam was standing very still with his hands down and slightly away from his body, both to appear non-threatening and to maintain his centre of gravity as the youth's left arm choke-hold around his throat forced his chin up and his head back slightly. Baring his teeth in a parody of a smile, the boy looked at John Winchester and said, "Hi dad."

_Continued in Chapter 7…_

© 2006 CD Stewart


	7. Chapter 7

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 7**

There was an eternal pause as reality exploded into shards and then reformed itself in a single eye-blink that lasted forever.

John's face was blank and bewildered as he stared at the teenager, but then he spoke softly, hesitantly, like a man vacationing abroad trying to buy a loaf of bread for the first time in unfamiliar, unused Holiday Spanish, "Dylan?"

The word seemed to make the boy, impossibly, angrier. "I suppose I should be grateful you remember that much. Yes, dad, it's Dylan. Cameron as I'm sure you've remembered."

"Clarksville." Dean suddenly said the word over his father's sad whisper. "You had a thing going with a bank clerk there for a couple of years…"

"Wow, brains as well as brawn," Dylan mocked, "you're not just an ugly face!"

For several seconds John continued to look dazed as though he was coming round from dental anaesthetic or something, but he finally seemed to focus on Dylan; his face became a mixture of yearning and hunger. "Dylan..."

"We've established that pops, try to keep with the program," Dylan sneered. "I gotta say when you reach sweet sixteen and your mom drops dead of a massive brain aneurysm it kinda does for your interest in scholastic achievement. Since CPS were only interested in dumping me in a foster home for two years until I was legally someone else's problem I declined their invitation to be institutionalised and came looking for my run-out of a deadbeat dad. In a way I'm glad we're finally at this point because two years of sleeping in a car does no good for your spine." He lowered his voice into a mock-conspiratorial hiss, "All those teenagers who do normal things like lose their virginity on the back seat of a car must be Olympic contortionists!"

John shook his head as if to clear it. "Two years…Dylan, I'm sorry it took so long to find me…"

Dylan laughed – a too loud, barking sound devoid of real amusement. But Sam missed his opening words because he couldn't hear over the sudden buzzing in his own ears. He remembered Clarksville only too well, for it had been the happiest period of his own life; John Winchester had used the little Midwest town as a base for several years – Sam had been 14 months old when they'd arrived and had been heartbroken when dad had uprooted them and left for good when he was 5 years old.

But Dylan had been looking for John Winchester since he was 16, two years ago, which meant…he was now 18-years-old. Dean was 26, Sam was 22 – but 22 minus 18 left you with…4. Dylan Cameron was not an unexpected surprise, nor had been even just a suspicious tummy bump when John Winchester bodily carried a loudly protesting Sam and deposited him in the back seat of that old rust-bucket clunker…Dylan Cameron had been one-year-old when John Winchester left Clarksville forever.

Sam's hearing cut back in, unsurprising since he was at the centre of things, unfortunately literally, as Dylan spat out, "Don't flatter yourself, old man, I've been on your ass for the past ten weeks, the only reason I didn't find you straightaway is because I made the mistake of looking for you in all the sensible places."

Sam flicked a glance at Dean; his brother's face was empty…calm and unmoved as a chiselled stone angel, his eyes flat, incredibly as if a new brother was of no interest to him. Dad…was clearly floundering. Sam knew from experience that John Winchester did not articulate his real feelings well – he should know, he was the same, which was probably why his childhood with the man had been one long fight.

_Okay – Hostage Negotiation 101, attempt to achieve a rapport with the whack-job holding the gun_… "What do you mean _sensible_ places?" He risked precious air on the question via his constricted windpipe and snapped his teeth together as the gun ground warningly deeper into his temple.

But the kid answered with another bark of sound masquerading as a laugh. "I knew about you, pops, every schoolyard bully was happy to fill in the bastard kid; not only was my dad a loser but he was _nuts_. He ditched the mongrel to go hunting boggits and bogeymen with his _real _two sons; the _perfect_ ones born to _Mary_ Winchester."

"Boggits are dangerous. Their claws are poisoned. One scratch and it's _sayonara_," commented Dean as if this were some upper-class Mothers' Union Tea Circle discussion on the merits of begonias versus azaleas.

Sam choked as Dylan's arm tightened convulsively round his throat and he bent all his telepathic abilities towards mentally urging Dean to_ shut up_.

"So I didn't think I had a problem," Dylan taunted John Winchester. "The reason it took me so long to pick up your trail is because I spent the first three months checking every psycho ward and loony asylum in North America…I seriously expected to find you in every one I visited. I even ended up wasting a trip to _New York_ on your scent."

"I've never been to New York," John replied automatically, looking at the boy in confusion as if it were finally dawning on him that they _might_ have a problem here.

"Duh, I know that _now_," Dylan retorted, "and by the way, you owe me $187 airfare plus tax for _that_ waste of time. But at the time I thought it was a hot lead – you're _famous_, dude," he drawled with false excitement. "This hotshot New York psychiatrist wrote a _New York Times_ bestseller on the four stages of grief – shock, anger, denial and acceptance – and how people can get 'stuck' in one of the first three. You should read it; it's worth…at least half of the cover price at any rate."

"Dylan, I…" John blinked rapidly as he tried to make sense of the snarled words.

The kid glared at him, "You really have no idea…You're the primary case study for Section 3 on Denial, pops." Dylan smirked at the older man's obvious confusion. "Professor Redwall went on for a dozen pages explaining how your inability to accept that your wife's death was a meaningless but tragic accident led to you creating an elaborate fantasy world populated by fantastical monsters, demons and gods in the eternal war of good and evil."

"What?" muttered John in shock, showing the first signs of getting a grip.

"I read that book in Chicago at breakfast and I was on the plane to New York in the evening. I thought Professor Redwall was the man…I pretended to be a psych student agog at meeting the great man. I let him waffle forever then asked him what it _was_ about his treatment of John Winchester's delusions that made the doc choose _him_ as his case study over similar patients…that's when he became a little less verbose and co-operative." Dylan snorted, "So I did a little B & E on his office after dark and it turns out the good doctor never met you. He stumbled across that crazy website exposé on you and your _two _sons here; all he did then was get hold of the newspaper articles from Lawrence covering your wife's death and made the whole thing up as he went along, the naughty boy."

Sam struggled to keep the tension from his own body as Dylan loosened his hold slightly; not that that was necessarily a good thing. He wasn't holding Sam as viciously but his agitation was increasing. Sam could feel the tremors from the kid's body as Dylan held him; the boy was running on rage and while that was powerful fuel, it befuddled the mind and left you exhausted and prone to doing extremely stupid things – just like the last time Sam had been stuck in this situation, with his own alter ego Max Miller in Dylan's place.

"I suppose there's some cosmic irony in that on the day I decide to call it quits, I look up out of the window of the diner I'm to keep out of the rain, and who do I see walking across the street to a battered old rust bucket but my father. I spent $100 on that taxi to follow you to your motel and you never spotted me your rear-view mirror."

"Dylan you could have come…I'm _happy_ that you found me…" John tried to speak.

"How could I have!" Dylan yelled for the first time, "I spent three days working myself up to walking up to that motel room door and trying to see if I could connect with my out-where-the-buses-don't-run father, and what happened? One night you go out to this house and some freak thing with _tentacles_ straight out of the _Alien_ franchise tries to make you into calamari! I'd spent years bracing myself for a deadbeat drifter with serious reality issues who was more Jack in _The Shining _than John Walton, and instead I find 'crazy John Winchester' is living _La Vida Loca, _because there really_ are_ monsters under the bed and something you do _not _want to know about living in your closet."

"Dylan, I wanted you and your mom to be safe –" John said earnestly, raking a step forward, only to freeze as Dylan forced Sam's head back cruelly.

Sam looked straight at Dean. He wasn't relaxed, but he wasn't terrified either. Sam did not expect Dean to be able to save him regardless of any odds, but he did have absolute faith in that Dean would _always_ do everything within his power to protect him. Dean locked his eyes with his brother, seeing the acknowledgement of his own silent order to be ready.

"No you didn't!" Sam winced as Dylan yelled an inch from his ear. "What you didn't _want_ was the son who _wasn't _the kid of perfect _Mary_. You took _her_ sons everywhere with you on your Jack Kerouac tribute; you barely let _them_ out of your sight, while all I got was a good view of that old sedan's rusted trunk disappearing down the blacktop for good."

"Dylan –" John winced the embittered denunciation – truth he was unable to deny.

Dylan was uninterested in reasons or excuses, only punishment, wilfully ignoring the lines on his father's weary face. He pressed the gun muzzle hard against Sam's temple as he taunted, "Tragic isn't it, pops? Twenty years ago you saved him but now you can't –" he smiled as John's face went grey with anguished fear as he curled his finger round the trigger.

"No he didn't." Dean contradicted as calmly as if talking about some trite irrelevance such as whether it had rained yesterday.

"What?" Dylan snapped out; his eyes flicked to the 'other one', the one he'd dismissed as little more than the 'smart-mouthed muscle' sidekick to John Winchester's 'special', favoured son.

"Dad didn't save Sammy from the fire," he reiterated, "_I did._"

And the shot echoed around the parking lot.

_Continued in Chapter 8…_

© 2006, C. D. Stewart


	8. Chapter 8

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 8**

Impacting with the concrete hard winded Sam and he could only lay there gasping for the air expelled forcefully from his lungs, his ears ringing in a cacophony of white noise from the concussion of the gun. He lay there an eternity of a few seconds, but forced himself to roll over and to his knees even as he sucked in air. A low inarticulate sound was coming from his left. Dylan Cameron was lying curled up, almost in foetal position, on the parking lot concrete, moaning softly as he clutched his gun hand to his chest. It was clearly badly sprained, if not broken, and it looked like he'd suffered at least one dislocated finger. Nearby was why - a .40 Smith & Wesson lay against the rear wheel of a nearby car, destroyed by the bullet that had hit it just above the trigger where the stock met the barrel and wrenched it from Cameron's grasp.

And Dean stood over him, his own gun pointed unerringly at Dylan's forehead.

_Dean_…Sam was still too winded for it to be more than an inaudible mouthing. Forcing himself to his feet and shutting off the pain in his ears, Sam put himself between his brother and his brother, in a moment of clarity realising what Dean had had to endure for most of his life as the buffer and bridge between Sam and John…who was frozen with indecision, clearly completely shocked by what had just happened and unable to respond.

Sam could relate, but somebody here seriously had to get a grip. He licked suddenly dry lips as he looked at Dean, not even for a microsecond foolishly thinking that Dean had been aiming his shot at the impossibly small target of Dylan's _gun_ when _Sam's_ life was in danger. Dean was well-experienced and expert in the use of firearms, but even at such close range he couldn't have _deliberately_ made such a shot with only an instant's reaction time available even if he'd sat there and practised the move for a millennium. Nor would he have tried – fancy 'impossible' shots were the sole purview of gun-sports shows and Hollywood/TV networks; in the real world, cops and soldiers faced with some crazy trying to hurt their partner or friend or comrade shot to put the guy down immediately without getting their friend hurt.

"_Dean…_" he appealed softly but Dean's expression didn't even flicker; his face was a sculpted mask, as perfect as Michelangelo's _David_…and just as lacking humanity.

_Okay..._ "Guys!" Sam barked the word in his best imitation of how dad used to be during his and Sam's many loud arguments in the run up to Sam 'running away' to college. "We _need_ to leave, now!" He pointed towards the diner, the back wall of which was mercifully all brick with no windows, just the metal door leading from the kitchen, "Miraculously nobody heard that shot, but right about now any fire for justice the sheriff may have lost is being refuelled with a vengeance by Julie Hanson and her video tape. We _cannot_ afford to be here if or when the sheriff decides he wants to interview the Hansons' three eccentric houseguests!"

"Sure, Sammy," Dean shrugged casually and smoothly the gun vanished back into his waistband at his lower back, completely hidden beneath his leather coat. "Don't have a cow, bro'."

Dylan Cameron had shakily got to his feet; in the distance came the faintly heard wail of what could have been a police siren. John Winchester turned and headed for his car, and Dylan did the same towards a small, dented old blue Toyota in the corner, defiantly scooping up the ruined gun into his jacket pocket en route; quite how he would manage to drive one-handed was a problem all his own – Sam had no intention of dealing with that as he instead turned and followed Dean back to the Impala.

No observer would have realised it was a bizarre convoy as three vehicles left the town limits of Wakefield at slightly more than the legal speed-limit in the knowledge that the local law was currently otherwise occupied. An old battered sedan was in front like a point man, followed by a compact blue Toyota and a black Impala was a growling rearguard like a hungry panther.

In the front passenger seat Sam felt his stomach begin to roil and churn and the warmth in his extremities leach away as shock set in. He flicked a glance at Dean.

"You didn't know about him." It was a statement, not a question; although almost five years older than Sam, Dean would still have been too young to realise the implications of seeing his dad with a woman.

"I know he saw a clerk at the local bank for a while…" Dean shrugged "…but after we left I never thought about Clarksville."

Which was classic Dean; how had he once put it? _Infiltrate, operate and expirate_ – go in, do the job and get out. Never look back, never dwell on 'what ifs?' and 'could-have-beens'. _While I spent the rest of my childhood turning Clarksville into a lost Utopia,_ Sam acknowledged.

He'd loved Clarksville, and when he hit five had started to let himself believe that Daddy would stay and he could start first grade and go home to the same house every night like a normal kid – he even vaguely remembered seeing dad smiling at a woman – her memory was nothing more than a outline feminine shape – and his fantasy that maybe she would become his new mommy in place of the one he knew only from the photographs that Daddy and Dean cried over. Sam glanced again at his brother. Over the years John Winchester had dated a few women, but always the romance had fizzled out – because of Dean. Sam had always been friendly and gregarious but above all accepting, each time secretly hoping this woman would be the one to break his father's obsession with avenging the murder of a woman Sam had no memory of.

Dean, however, was not. He had in no way been naughty, malicious, disobedient or even slightly hostile. But he had been quiet and watchful, reserved and wary, always on alert and placing himself between his brother and the woman. John and Sam were perfect, but eventually the woman inevitably decided she couldn't deal with the 'odd kid', the 'other one'. Sam suddenly recalled back when he was ten and he'd overheard his dad's last – to date – girlfriend on the phone to her sister complaining that she couldn't deal with '…_the weird kid. It's such a shame 'cause, Sammy, he's adorable, but the older boy, Dean? He's just not firing on all cylinders if you ask me. I'm telling you, twenty years from now **that** kid is going be the lead-in on 'America's Most Wanted' under the latest serial killer banner, you mark my words. A year from now he'll be in Juvie Hall, I bet.' _

For the first time, Sam got where she was coming from. "What the hell was that, shooting at Dylan?"

Dean didn't even look at him, just kept his eyes on the Toyota in front of them that was directly behind John Winchester's car. "The psycho had a gun to my brother's head. What would you suggest I should have done?"

"He's our brother!"

"I've _got_ a brother," Dean shrugged, "and I don't have time to deal with any more."

"Well I suggest you rethink that policy, Dean," Sam turned his head and looked directly at his brother's cold face, "because back there – for the first time in my life, I was afraid _of _you instead of _for _you."

He watched the barb strike home in the spasmodic clenching of the jaw and the whitening of knuckles on the steering wheel, but Dean continued to obstinately glare straight ahead.

Sam turned his attention back to the vehicles in front again, closing his mouth and breathing rhythmically through his nostrils to control his shock-induced sensation of nausea. The fear that Dylan Cameron was well on his way to being another Max Miller was an almost visible spectre in the car and now he had Dean to worry about too. How much worse could the Winchester family psyche get? His new-found baby brother was a psychotic Freudian nightmare with a Bates-esque mother fixation and his older brother was suddenly channelling Charles Manson.

For a moment Sam shivered not with reaction but the fear of what would have happened if he'd let Meg talk him into sticking with her to California. Assuming Dean had come up with some foolproof plan to destroy the Vanir there would still have been nobody to get him out of that shack and to the hospital when he accidentally electrocuted himself if Sam hadn't been around. But Sam knew the world, and events had a way of twisting back on themselves. What had some guy once said…? _Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be; sometimes, happily, it fails, and sometimes, happily, it succeeds._ Somehow if Dean had been gotten to a hospital, he could have still have ended up with the faith-healing Reverend Roy Le Strange pinging on his radar.

What had shocked and angered Sam the most was not Dean's decision to kill Roy, but the dangerously close to _casual_ way in which he'd made it. What would have happened if Sam hadn't been around to stop Dean? _The road to hell is paved with good intentions_…what would Dean have done, what would it have done _to _Dean, to find out that he had killed an entirely innocent, honest-hearted man that genuinely believed he been given a second chance and a purpose to help deserving people?

Before they'd left, Sam insisted that they made sure that all the crap from Sue-Ann's altar in the basement was incinerated so Roy never realised his wife had been an evil nut-job; it would have devastated the man to know that he had not been 'healing' but instead killing one person in saving another thanks to his psychotic wife setting herself up in the place of God as judge, jury and executioner of the human heart. Roy had predictability decided that his loss of power to heal at the moment of his wife's death from 'stroke' had meant that she was the source of his gift. Roy believed the gift of healing of had been taken away from him to make a point in the same way he believed he had been given it in the first place to make a point and his love of god and faith was as undiminished as ever.

Dean had told Sam what Layla had told him, that having genuine faith meant you had to have it when the miracles _didn't _happen – or _stopped _happening. Then he'd quietly thanked Sam for insisting that they destroy the unclean altar and all traces of Sue-Ann's perfidy before going out to 'get some food'. Worried, Sam had discreetly tracked him to a little church and listened as Dean started to have a nervous but sincere conversation with God on the subject of Layla. Then he'd resolutely turned and slipped away before Dean had finished the first sentence, since to stay would have been an unconscionable invasion of Dean's privacy.

_That _was the brother he wanted in the car right now, not this Ted Bundy clone – and nor did Sam forget that Dean had all too readily considered killing poor Max Miller to be a 'viable solution' as well.

John Winchester slowed and turned into the parking lot of the first motel as they reached Springfield – a large and therefore safely anonymous town. It was a fleapit of a place that was – just barely – a step above charging by the hour, but the prominent: CASH ONLY sign accounted for its popularity amongst a certain demographic of customer, implying with it what the clientele viewed as a _reassuring_ uninterest in them and widespread poor memories amongst the staff.

Hostility rolling off him in waves, Dylan Cameron awkwardly scrabbled out of his Toyota and marched up to the front desk, laying out dead presidents for a single room, a procedure John Winchester copied – cesspit as the place was a middle-aged man trying to persuade teenage boy to share a room with him was still pushing the boundaries. As it was the guy at the front desk – manager was far too grandiloquent a term for the dumpy, unshaven man wearing a sweat-stained vest and braces straining to contain his beer gut – gave Dean and Sam a blatant once-over of mingled disgust and salacious interest as they, as usual, took a twin room. Neither bothered to correct his misconception or attempted persuade their dad to bunk in with them. Dean had reached the stage where he could, if not exactly sleep through, at least settle down rapidly after one of Sam's nightmare/vision episodes; anyone else attempting to sleep in close proximity had had it.

The twin room was dingy and dark by virtue of stiff semi-closed curtains heavy with dust, dirt, nicotine and a whole_ smörgåsbord_ of other narcotic substances, featuring peeling wallpaper last fashionable during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and two sagging, queen-sized beds separated by a rickety bedside cabinet that looked as if they'd been there just as long. God only knew what was living in them. The 'bathroom' was barely more than a closet in which an architectural genius had managed to cram a john, a miniscule sink and a 'shower' useless for anyone above a size 8. Someone had apparently decided that the shower could be classed as having cleaned itself whenever it was used; the showerhead was a paradise for Legionella and the plughole was a black crusted homage to lime-scale that itself could well have been a rotted memory, sort of like a fossil was the imprint of something long decayed.

Having expected nothing else and been prepared for much worse, Sam and Dean simply tossed their holdalls on the beds – which they would sleep on _top_ of to minimise contamination – ignoring the metal slots at each of the heads that enabled you to make them vibrate if you put in a quarter. They also ignored the miniscule closet, since they never unpacked more than the bare minimum of necessities from their gear – they never stayed in any one place longer than four or five days and it was an extremely useful practice in case of needing to make a rapid departure from the locale.

Sam ignored his holdall altogether and went past his brother to the door.

"Where are you going?" Dean demanded.

"To take care of Dylan's hand," Sam retorted, "someone has to and I think it's safe to say he won't let you or dad anywhere near him."

_Continued in Chapter 9…_

© 2006, C D Stewart


	9. Chapter 9

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Chapter 9**

Sam looked wearily at the dim display of the bedside clock, the LED clearly on its last legs: 5:42am. For a moment he was tempted to close his eyes and go back to sleep, but instead he sat up, because he knew; sometimes you didn't need a nightmare or a vision to clue you in, just the ability to watch what was going on right in front of your face.

Dean awoke instantly as Sam sat up and pulled on his shoes; sleeping on top of the bed fully clothed wasn't a brilliant method of getting a restful night's sleep but no way were they going to make more bodily contact with the bedding than they had to.

"What're you doing?"

"Dylan's intending to split," Sam said quietly. "I'm going to talk to him."

For a moment their eyes locked before Dean deliberately broke the contact by closing his eyes. "Try to keep your noise down to a dull roar, Sammy," was his only comment.

Sam slipped quietly from the room and down to the parking lot of the _Bates Motel II_, where as he had known, he saw Dylan struggling to shove his gear into the Toyota one-handed, the other hand – no more than badly sprained with fingers bruised not dislocated – having been strapped up for him by Sam. Who now drew in a deep breath hoping it would give him some inner resilience. The past two days had been the most unpleasant of Sam's life bar none – including being trapped in the woods with a wendigou, including when Dean was stricken in a hospital bed, including his last furious fight with his dad before he 'escaped' to college for two years of normalcy.

"You're definitely dad's kid," Sam commented as he watched Dylan toss a backpack into the foot-well of the front passenger seat, "The cut-and-run is classic John Winchester."

"Go to hell."

"Very probably," Sam conceded, looking at his half-brother and feeling his heart twinge at the dark circles under Dylan's eyes and his pallid, drawn face. "So, you headed anywhere in particular?"

"Anywhere away from you," Dylan retorted and turned to him. "What, no earnest plea for a change of heart?"

"Your heart isn't the problem; it wants to stay here," Sam told his half-brother quietly, "but your head's in charge. Besides, I know why you're running away – because it's easier than facing the truth."

"Truth? This from a guy whose father is king of the credit-card scam?" Dylan snarled.

"When I was a kid I saw a preacher, one of those evangelicals," Sam commented, ignoring the jibe. "This woman drove him away yelling words I'd never heard of, so I walked after him and asked him why he did it when people were mean to him. He said he had no choice."

Dylan was looking at him like he was crazy, obviously thrown by the _non sequitur_.

"I didn't get it and he said that the reason most people don't want to hear the truth is because accepting the truth about something immediately puts you under a moral obligation to act on it. He said he was like the only guy on a street with a TV. When a hurricane warning came on he could grab his family and hide in the basement and be safe, but he'd be as responsible for his neighbours' deaths as if he'd gone around their houses with a 12-gauge; the guy had a moral responsibility to warn them of the impending danger. He quoted Scripture, somewhere in Ezekiel, I think, about God telling the prophet, '_If I say unto the wicked one he will die for his sin, and you do not actually warn him, the wicked one for his sin will die, but his blood I shall ask back from your hand. But if you warn the wicked one, and he shall not repent, for his sin he will die, but you will have delivered your own soul._'"

"Wow, pretty parable," Dylan snapped. "Did you hit your head this morning?"

"I didn't get it either," Sam acknowledged, "and the preacher told me that he didn't particularly enjoy doing what he did but that accepting the truth placed him under a moral obligation to warn others that they were reaping the whirlwind. _"'Son, when the last trumpet sounds and the Lord demands, 'What did you do in the Great War?', none of the bad guys is going to be able to point the finger at me and say, 'But he never said!'"_ Then the preacher looked at me said that was why the lady had driven him away, because she hadn't wanted to accept the moral duty to act in acknowledging he was telling the truth. He told me that there is no such thing as an atheist, just someone trying to shirk their responsibilities – to God and man."

"Do you have, like, a _point_ anytime soon?"

"That is my point," Sam shrugged. "All your life you've been able to nurse your righteous anger, secure in the moral high ground of having the two-for-one-deal: deadbeat dad _and _whacko. But now you can't; because now you know that what our father hunts and fights and kills is _real_ and evil and out there. John Winchester is a _bona fide _American hero, and it's easier to run away from that truth than accept that your mom carries her fair share of responsibility for the fact that your life sucked."

"Don't talk about my mother like that," Dylan snarled and swelled his frame menacingly, "Deanie isn't here to save your ass this time."

"Dean said the same thing to me once," Sam replied, "right before he slammed me into a bridge pylon, actually. Look, you're right about dad. He liked your mom, but he didn't love her…he wanted a woman who was compassionate but undemanding while he learned to live in the world again, or at least function in it. But he does love _you_ Dylan, because he's incapable of _not _loving his children…"

"But he'll never love me as much as he does Mary Winchester's sons." Dylan accused, for the first time showing as much hurt as anger.

"No, he won't," Sam admitted, not denying the fact. "But Sarah Cameron is no saint here. She liked our dad, but she didn't love him either…She wanted to be a mother but not a mate, and she lucked out because she found a man who was decent and responsible, but who wouldn't cause her any problems when she wanted to ease him out of the picture a couple of years down the line. Your mother and our father were cut from the same cloth; they both had their own agendas and we came a distant second."

"She never cared that it was just the two of us," Dylan stared at his sneakers as if they held the answer to the meaning of life. "I never told her about the bullying and about wanting a dad like the other kids…but _he _left _us_, she didn't _force _him away."

"And you know damn well why," Sam countered. "Look, our dad's made mistakes – plenty – but he wasn't some run-out loser who abandoned you to spend the rest of his life with Jim, Jack and Johnny in some sleazy bar somewhere. He wanted you to be safe…to have a normal life."

"Isn't that what _you_ wanted?" Dylan parried shrewdly, "I know you went to college for a couple of years and you cut off all contact."

"We both did, or so I thought." Sam corrected. "We had a massive fight about me going –"

Dylan's eyes widened, "Fight?" There was a faint hint of challenge, unwilling to relinquish his long-held grudge about John, Dean and Sam as a sort of Walton trio living in full male-bonding harmony where never was heard a discouraging word. "Your…our…dad – hit you?"

"Dad never raised his hand against us," Sam retorted instantly…_and even if he had, Dean would have put himself between me and the blow_…"Unfortunately me and dad have always been like oil and water – and nitro and glycerine. In half the ways that matter we're too much alike to get on and when it comes to the rest of the important stuff in life we're too different to relate. Once I vowed to apologise to dad when me and Dean found him again and my brother said he'd give it five minutes before we were at each other's throats…in the event I think we managed about a minute-and-a-half. Up until I finally went to college me and dad were either yelling at each other, throwing crockery and slamming doors or else competing for days on end in icy silences and acting as if each other were invisible, communicating only through the intermediary of Dean. I found out a little while ago that dad used to come by Stanford to check I was safe."

"You didn't know?" Dylan asked.

"Like Dean said to me – it's a two-way street; I _could _have picked up the phone. Although in retrospect, maybe I didn't _want_ to know." Sam amended. "But then again we didn't have the _normal_ father-son relationship angst. I was a baby when the demon murdered my mother. Dad was so scared that he was going to lose me that he…suffocated me. When Dean was _eleven_ he hunted for the first time alone, but when I was _fourteen_ my dad still wouldn't allow me to go solo, only with him or Dean…" _and I couldn't ever see past my own resentment long enough to realise that the way dad treated me made Dean always feel as if he were the less important son, the expendable son,_ "…and as if that weren't enough – I could never forgive my father for taking me away from Clarksville and my chance of a normal life and he could never accept my less than whole-hearted dedication to avenging the murder of a woman I never knew. "

"So you jacked college because you think you owe our father?" Dylan challenged.

"No," Sam vetoed firmly, "Caring for any child you bring into the world is a parent's sacred and binding _responsibility_, not an optional extra tick-box on some metaphorical parenthood form. I don't owe our father anything…but Dean I owe everything."

Dylan snorted derisorily, "Dude, if Dean Winchester is your idea of perfect big brother material, our family is even more dysfunctional that even _I_ want to think about."

"When he was thirteen, my brother killed a man for me."

Sam allowed himself to savour a moment of slightly malicious satisfaction as shock wiped the challenge and contempt from the kid's face.

Quietly Sam told him, "Someone who didn't like me very much once told me Dean was jealous of me - my friends, my life, going to college and holding down a normal job …what he didn't say what that Dean had every _right_ to be. He gave me everything of himself and all he got from me was a shrug and a nice view of my back as I walked away."

"So you're staying because you think you owe Dean?" for the first time since they'd met, Dylan's tone was plaintive rather than hostile.

"I'm Dean's world," Sam sighed, "but he was never _mine_…at least not until he finally left me, drove off leaving me on a back road to Nowheresville."

"He just drove away?" Dylan asked sceptically.

"I'd finally pushed him too far," Sam confessed his guilt finally. "In the end it was inevitable that either dad or I was going to. In our civil war for Dean's love no quarter was asked or given - he was our mediator and our victory prize. Each of us constantly demanded ever more impossible demonstrations of his love and loyalty to _'me_' unknowing and uncaring of the fact that we put him through emotional hell every time we forced him to choose between us. We knew dad was in California but he ordered us not to look for him and go to Indiana instead."

"What did you do?" Dylan demanded.

Sam shook his head, "Dean as always obeyed dad. I threw a strop in the car on the way and demanded we scratch Indiana and go to California after dad else I wasn't going any further. I didn't even expect to find dad if we _went_ to California. That wasn't the point, I was just demanding that Dean choose me over dad, that he yet again prove his love for me by following my wishes. Even with dad a thousand miles away it was just another power play between us over control of Dean."

"And so he dumped you at the side of the road and went to Indiana?"

"More or less, after pointing out what a selfish bastard I was. I'd finally hurt him once too much, once too often…I was going to head for California but…the separation put things into perspective. It was like God or the universe decided to let me have a close up and personal view of what was slipping away from me, from the human race, bit by bit."

"I don't understand?"

Sam looked at his half-brother, feeling the phantom presence of a gun pressed against his head momentarily, "We hunt evil, Dylan, and we kill evil. But we don't kill human beings because there's a very important difference. A demon's only aim is to cause as much death and destruction as possible. It will never change and never repent. But when you kill a human, you rob them of any chance to atone. As long as they live there is always the chance, however slight, that they will manage to achieve redemption. Killing a human being is a terrible thing and it causes profound psychological damage. The more you do it, paradoxically the easier it becomes because each time the damage you do is exponentially greater."

Sam watched Dylan as the kid absorbed this statement; at this moment, for the first time, Dylan was being shown the reality of his half-brothers lives - that they were not and never had been the indulged, pampered heirs he'd always rationalised them to be in his juvenile fantasies of himself and his mother as the wronged innocents.

"It's not that Dean _doesn't_ believe you're our brother. It's that it doesn't _mean_ anything to him, which scares me far more than anything we have ever faced. If you'd found us before I went to college, he would have been seriously pissed off, but he would have accepted you. I was barely out of the picture a couple of years and…he can't even _connect_ any more." Sam admitted.

"And _you're_ single-handedly going to stop him from going over to the Dark Side?"

"You better believe it. I did _not_ spend my life learning how to be a real deal Road Warrior for it to finish up that one day a monster I have to hunt used to be my brother. Dean's soul is _mine_, and I will keep it on the side of the righteous if I have to pin him here kicking and screaming."

"So you're going to stay with them." Dylan said with resignation, "Hunting with Dean, for his soul's sake."

Sam shrugged. "Like the preacher - I have no choice. I am Luke Skywalker – '_I have no memory of my mother, I never knew her_'. But _they_ did know her, and they loved her and her ghost lurks in their eyes _always_. One thing I do know for damn sure is that me being Joe Average is not worth it at the price of Dean going Darth Vader. The one thing you can't sacrifice for your heart's desire is your heart."

"And so what?" Dylan folded his arms in defensive sulkiness. "You expect me to _join_ your quest to make sure Dean stays more Don Quixote than Don Corleone?"

"No, I want you to do the opposite. I want you go to college and be a doctor; to have a mortgage and a dog; to stand for two hours in the driving rain 'cause your kid's his Little League team's ace hitter; to spend three hours in a post office queue because you filled in tax form 131bz instead of 132za."

Dylan blinked rapidly, taken aback by this list of mundane trivia and the obvious yearning for it in his half-brother's voice.

Sam sucked in a deep breath and then released it in an equally deep sigh as he finally let go of his resentful longing for the life he knew he would never experience. "I want you to have the life I never will – and I want you to live it for the _both_ of us."

_Concluded in epilogue_…

© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart


	10. Epilogue

**_Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: _**see Chapter 1

**LIVING LA VIDA LOCA**

**Epilogue**

"And that's just what I did. I lived the life Sam Winchester could never have, because he loved his brother and our father. Enough to understand their obsession, enough to forgive them for it, and even enough to join their quest to avenge a woman he'd never known and couldn't grieve for. My brothers spent their lives, spent _themselves_ making sure the world was better and safer so that people like us could have the comfort of laughing at notions of the monster under the bed and the bogeyman in the closet." Dylan finished quietly but clearly.

Part of him wanted to laugh at their wide eyes and stunned faces as they looked, not at him, but past him at the quartet of graves in this old, elegant country cemetery, truly understanding for the first time. The twins' eyes were dark pools of distress but somehow not as much shock as the rest of the family, as if on some level they had only been waiting for confirmation rather than revelation.

Memory popped into Dylan's head of when they were born and how he'd overheard their uncle, his second son Barry, semi-jokingly declare to his mother that the new grandfather wouldn't be given the option to name any further grandchildren after lumbering his first with the weighty Deanna Joan Winchester Cameron and her thirty-six seconds younger sister Samantha Mary Winchester Cameron – _where on earth did he get Winchester from, for heaven's sake? Sounds like some pretentious lawyer name from Boston – came over on the Mayflower and all that! _

Now they knew, and now they knew why he had never permitted the logical shortening from Deanna and Samantha to Dean and Sam. They _weren't_ Dean and Sam.

He smiled at the twins, "Maybe it's because you're twins that you picked up on that entity in your dorm room, but whatever it is, it is real and you'll defeat it, because you have what my brothers didn't have – us. You've got a family who will support you and help you - all the way and come what may. Now, let's go back inside to warm up and get some coffee. Come on, everyone."

They obeyed, shuffling and stuttering back towards the gate, their conversations meaningless frantic humming. Now they were awestruck and confused, but once back in 'normalcy' the protests would start and the arguments and their desperate, frantic clinging to 'rationality' and 'reason'. No matter; he would let them talk themselves in circles while he did what was necessary.

He had deliberately slowed his gait at the back and now each twin, Deanna left and Samantha right, linked an arm though his and began to help their old grandpa back to the big fancy gates of the cemetery – very slowly; they understood that this was not for the others' ears and minds currently reeling and unwilling to accept harsher, more painful revelations.

"Thanks, gramps," Samantha whispered softly, her and her sister's eyes reflecting gratitude and no longer stained by the fears of craziness and 'over-imagination' regarding something only they had been able to see and hear.

"I couldn't help them," he murmured his regret, "though they didn't really want me to. It gave them a strange kind of comfort to know that one of them got to be Joe Average…being stuck in rush hour; paying a mortgage; hating tax returns; watching their kids in the school play and coaching Little League, chaperoning the junior prom…"

"James Bond secretly wants nine-to-five in the 'burbs," Samantha whispered, as ever perceptive – _oh, so much like Sam…_

"They never visited after you met Nan and had the children." Deanna's words were a statement, not a question.

"Our paths crossed a couple of times when I was first dating your Nan…she always believed they were old college buddies. On Friday nights I used to go to McKinley's for a beer after work, and sometimes – just sometimes – they'd be there at the bar waiting for me, and we'd catch up and play a game of pool. But they never came to my home once I was with your Nan and the kids…"

"And part of you was relieved that they didn't." It was Deanna's gift and her curse, that unflinching honesty as if she had some genetically conferred inability to be self-deceptive. Again, just like the great-uncle she'd never known; Dean Winchester had lied like a rug to outsiders and strangers, but with himself and his family he'd been one of the most self-aware people on the planet, brutally so oftentimes.

"It was too dangerous, always, for them and us…" he said aloud for the first time the words he'd been telling himself nearly seventy years – _a lifetime_. "They could never switch off, they could never stand down; they could never indulge in…that ridiculous phrase they coined way back in the 1980s? – oh yes, 'me time'." He snorted, "An aptly egocentric phrase. At McKinley's, if one drank, the other didn't; when one played his pool shot, the other kept watch – _always_, and whichever one drank, I never saw him have more than one beer, or drink liquor or spirits. They could never risk, even once, cutting loose and getting drunk – or stoned."

"Gramps," Samantha chided with her gentle – always gentle – reproof.

Despite himself he grinned. "I know what goes on in college young lady, I did most of it…and I want to give both of you the chance to. My brothers didn't have the support network you're going to. You'll do important things, good things, brave things, but I don't want you to be –"

"Consumed," Deanna murmured quietly, flicking a glance ahead to where the rest of the family had just reached the gates, safely out of earshot, _like they were._

Obliquely he replied, "Dean and I…we achieved détente…but we were never truly close; a distant affection at best. For a long time I blamed him for it, but then…Dean Winchester was only 26 years old when I first met him face-to-face but his eyes…his eyes were the oldest thing I have ever seen in this world. One day for no reason I can recall now, I just remembered that moment of first looking into his eyes and for the first time I was able to be angry _for _him, instead of _at _him."

They pressed slightly closer in silent encouragement even as their young eyes watched the frosty path for slippery patches, and he knew they understood.

"He didn't mean to, but John abrogated his emotional responsibilities of fatherhood from the night Mary Winchester was killed. It was Dean that carried his brother through the fire - and in a sense, he never stopped. Even as early as I met him, he'd been emotionally burnt-out for years; probably one of the reasons he never managed any meaningful or even reasonably lengthy romance. He had no emotional reserves left to give to a lover…" _or another brother._

He didn't finish the sentence, but he didn't need to, twin squeezes on each arm transmitted sorrow and comfort. He sighed deeply, and sadly. "Their world – their existence – was always dark. Even at the best of times they could only come out of the darkness into twilight, rather than full sunlight…" Now he checked that his family were too far away to hear. "Once, just before I met your Nan, they came to stay at my bachelor pad for a few days…listen to me, bachelor pad – crappy little apartment with a major 'roach problem."

"Why?" Deanna asked, ever the straight-shooting inquisitor.

"They were lying low from some guy – a sheriff, or a US Marshal, hell, maybe even a Fed - with a too-curious mind who'd decided to delve a little deeper into just who this amiable pair of _Jack Kerouac _imitators were and what exactly they did on their travels. I don't know anything more – he must have decided they were either nut jobs that needed institutionalising or else 'responsible' for half the atrocities they stopped from happening again or prevented from starting in the first place. Back in those days thinking outside the box was discouraged in law enforcement officials."

"Not news, gramps," Samantha muttered, steering him around a broken paving stone as they neared the gates.

That was his Samantha, and had been his Sam – quiet and perceptive, but capable of plenty of sass when needed. _I miss you Sam, so much_, _you always wanted to be for me what Dean was for you, and you knew you never could_. "They turned up on the doorstep at midnight, barely speaking to each other 'cause they'd got lost on the back roads – half of which aren't shown on modern maps even now – and we just hung out eating cold pizza for breakfast and watching TV. But one morning I accidentally went into the bathroom just as Dean was getting out of the shower…"

They waited in silence while he swallowed against the painful memory.

He blew out a sharp breath, the pain of which had nothing to do with possessing a pair of octogenarian lungs or the crisp and chill winter air, "He had scars – very, very bad scars - on his body….undoubtedly another reason for Dean's revolving-door love life. Sticking to brief encounters and one-night stands meant he never had to look into the eyes of a woman he loved and flat-out lie to her about _why_ his body looked like it had come off a bad second in a serious argument with a Mack truck…" _and god only knows what Sam told his first lover Jessica for two years_.

"Is that how they were killed?" Deanna's words were barely audible ghosts on her breath, her eyes reflecting sorrowful wisdom – not _died_ but _killed_.

He saw that the first car had gone, heading back to their winter house to make up the fire and prepare comfort food and drinks and strategise for the first 'this can't be true' salvo. His daughters had nominated the eldest two – Dylan Junior and Barry - to ride herd on him and the twins. Idly he wondered what they would do if he were to reveal that the family wealth they enjoyed so much came, not from his prudent running of a rural doctor's practice, but from him being the sole heir of his father and brothers - who had been given that stupendous wad of cash by a very grateful billionaire for saving his only daughter from being raped and murdered by an incubus demon.

"Not as such. During a particularly nasty hunting trip Dean was badly injured - by that time our dad had been gone a while. They won, but the human body can only take so much rough handling before it starts to wear out and wind down. And they could hardly make a trip to the ER and explain that Dean's injuries were caused by a demon trying to play Pinyada with him. He died in his sleep during the night…"

_Your Nan had taken the kids to visit her sister for the weekend and she never knew, ever, about that phone call I got from Sam at the surgery. About how I just tore out the door and caught the first plane they had and drove and drove through the night without ever going below eighty until I got to that stupid hick town in the middle of nowhere. About how I walked into that cabin, barely more than a shack, and found Sam sat on that crappy couch, holding Dean against his chest – so gently, so carefully, so tenderly – and shaking like a leaf from his own crying; it should have been embarrassing – seeing a man of his age bawling like a baby, but then I went and joined in, didn't I? About how I never got closure, I never got to say what I wanted to say, what I **needed** to say, because the I-don't-do-talking-about-feelings bastard had died two hours before I got there. Even now I bet he did it just to avoid having to actually **talk** to me._

"Grandpa?" dread was in both pairs of eyes; "Sam…killed himself?"

He chose his words with care, so that they would understand; it was imperative. "It wasn't like the stereotype. His father and his brother were Sam's world…and without Dean…it was always Dean, you see. For months after Mary Winchester was killed, John could barely function enough to look after himself until he got a grip…" _spurred on by his obsession…_"So six-year-old Dean changed diapers and fed formula and encouraged baby to walk and use a potty. Dean read Sam the bedtime stories and made him eat his breakfast and his greens and clean his teeth and wash behind his ears. Dean taught him to play ball and showed him how to build a snowman and took him sledding and tree-climbing. Dean taught him to swim and play hockey and spent his own allowance money on Sam's favourite candy. All those male rites of passage - how to shave; how to drive; how to kiss girls, how to unhook bras one-handed without looking, he learned from _Dean_."

"…and once Dean was gone…" the twins exchanged a look. So identical even their parents sometimes hesitated to tell them apart, they acknowledged that even the idea of a sole existence was an unendurable horror. They too knew what it was like for two to be as one.

"About three months after Dean died Sam got a call from an old girlfriend and discovered he was a father. A baby girl that she'd called, entirely coincidentally believe it or not, _Deana Mary_." Even now, he shivered with the uncanny providence of the name.

"Sam has a daughter?" Samantha spoke with unconscious loudness, drawing a warning hiss from her sister.

"Had a daughter; the little girl died at the age of sixteen months from, of all the stupid things, measles. Sad, but entirely natural not mystical – and believe me, Sam investigated." _You didn't spot her grave, at the far end of the quartet, that little one next to Mary Winchester, hidden in that patch of snowdrops. _"But after that…he had never intended to have children; it was why he was so obstreperous about having a DNA test done on Deana in the beginning. For future reference the pair of you – condoms_ can_ split. He understood 'hereditary' better than anyone and was always afraid any child he fathered would inherit the same abilities Mary had given him."

_The reason why she was killed, and why his lover Jessica was killed and why he could never have a normal life_. Again, he didn't need to say it. "He decided it was time. Once Dean was gone – he was tired, and he was done. He'd earned the right to rest more than anyone else on this planet – there are hundreds of people, even thousands – alive today for no other reason than that John Winchester and his sons possessed the personal integrity and sense of duty to try and make sure other families were spared their pain." _They accepted the truth and the moral obligation it laid upon them to act._

"_As peace after war, so death after life does greatly please…_" Deanna quoted the line, her voice a delicate whisper that faded as they stepped onto the sidewalk out of the cemetery.

As they moved forward Dylan half turned and closed the cemetery gates fully, his eyes automatically going towards the spot though his vision could no longer go the distance. But as he turned back to those waiting at the car he felt a lightness within himself that hadn't been there for a long time. For so long he'd been counting days and marking time, having no distraction other than mundane trivia; right now his aches were less and more endurable.

He had a purpose, a point. For however long he had left he could provide the twins with the guidance and the support that a different place and time had meant he could never do for his brothers, and he would make every second count…

And the winter sun bathed the cemetery in bright cheer, encouraging the snowdrops that pushed valiantly up and nourishing the hardy grass, and a faint breeze caused the boughs of the willow tree to bend slightly and stroke the top of four gravestones as if a brief caress.

© 2006, Catherine D Stewart

_Author's Note: _ this is a 'one-shot' story I wrote to work through various ideas that occurred to me as I watched Season 1; it is unlikely (though never impossible) that I will write fiction in this fandom again. It depends on how future Seasons/episodes develop in this regard as to whether I am inspired. However, I hope you enjoy this story.

_Grammatical note: _In British English, 'disinterested' is to be impartial and unbiased, while 'uninterested' is to be indifferent and uncaring.


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